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GM to the Top 1% ☕
The safest deal I had all year died in a single Slack message. Nine words. "Hey, wanted you to hear it from me first."
My champion had taken a role at another company. He was gone in two weeks. And when he left, he took the entire deal with him, because I had built the whole thing on him.
I told myself it was bad luck. It was not. It was bad architecture.
💡 A CHAMPION IS A RELATIONSHIP, NOT AN INSURANCE POLICY
For six weeks that deal felt bulletproof. He replied in minutes. He forwarded my one pager internally. He told me on a call, half laughing, that it was basically signed. So I did what feels productive and is actually lazy. I coasted on the one relationship that was easy.
I never met his boss. I never talked to the finance lead who would sign. I never asked the quiet security architect a single question. I had one door into a building with fifteen rooms, and I called it a strategy.
When he left, the new owner inherited a vendor she had never spoken to, championed by a person no longer in the company. To her, we were a line item with no face. She restarted the evaluation. We did not survive it.
The lesson was not "champions leave." Champions always leave eventually. The lesson was that a deal riding on one person is not de-risked by how much that person likes you. It is exposed by exactly how much they like you, because their enthusiasm lets you skip the work that actually holds a deal together.
🔧 THE SECOND DOOR RULE
Never let a deal live on one relationship. Build the second door while the first one is still open.
1. Ask your champion to widen, not just advocate: "Who else should be in the room so this survives a reorg." Frame it as protecting the project, because it is.
2. Earn a peer, not a referral: A forwarded intro is nothing. Bring the finance or security stakeholder one specific thing they care about, and get your own fifteen minutes.
3. Map the exit risk: For every deal, write the sentence "if this person leaves, here is who carries it." If you cannot finish it, that is your next meeting.
4. Document the why, not just the what: Leave a written business case inside the account that outlives any single person. When the champion goes, the logic stays.
🎯 THIS WEEK'S HOMEWORK
Take the deal you feel most confident about and write down what happens if your main contact leaves next month. If the honest answer is "it dies," you have found the least safe deal in your pipeline, not the safest. Book the second door this week.
❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY
Which of your deals would not survive your champion changing jobs?
Reply and tell me the one that just came to mind. That is the one to work today.
See you tomorrow.
Edward
Founder, Morning Sales
P.S. Rebuilding how you architect a deal so it survives a reorg is most of what we work on inside the AI-Native Sales Leader course. It is a full system for running enterprise deals in the agent era, coverage, governance, deployment, the parts a tool cannot do for you. It is 599 dollars: https://maven.com/edward-gorbis/the-ai-native-sales-leader