Are You a Due Diligence Vendor?
Are You A Due Diligence Vendor?
Most sellers have experienced some version of the same frustration.
A deal feels healthy.
The meetings are productive. Stakeholders continue showing up. New conversations get added to the calendar. Requests keep coming. The customer appears engaged and every interaction seems to create a little more momentum.
Then the decision gets made.
And somehow you lose.
Not because your product was inferior. Not because your champion disappeared. Not because the competition did something extraordinary.
You lose because you were never really competing in the first place.
You were helping someone else justify a decision they had already made.
It took me years to recognize how often this happens.
The Deal I Thought I Was Winning
Early in my career, I worked a deal that looked almost perfect from the outside.
The person I viewed as my champion was deeply engaged in the process. He knew our product inside and out. Every feature seemed to generate another conversation. Every conversation led to another question. He would challenge our engineers, pull in product leaders, ask for clarifications, and offer suggestions on ways our platform could improve.
At times it felt less like a sales cycle and more like a partnership.
If someone had looked at the activity in the account, they would have assumed we were the front-runner.
I certainly did.
What makes the story interesting is that he wasn't pretending. He genuinely wanted to understand our solution. He genuinely wanted to learn how we approached the problem.
The part I missed was why.
Looking back, there was one thing he never challenged.
Pricing.
At the time I viewed that as positive. We were the most expensive solution in the market, yet there was no negotiation. No concern about budget. No conversations around justification. No requests for concessions.
Today, that would immediately get my attention.
Back then, I interpreted it as confidence.
What I eventually learned was something very different.
The person I thought was my champion was also the champion of our competitor.
Everything we shared became validation for a recommendation he had already made internally.
Our technical differentiators.
Our product roadmap.
Our architecture.
Even our budgetary pricing.
He used all of it to strengthen his business case for choosing someone else.
The more information we provided, the stronger his recommendation became.
We thought we were influencing the decision.
In reality, we were helping support it.
What makes these situations difficult is that most due diligence vendors don't realize what's happening while it's happening. The signals are subtle, and they often look like positive buying behavior. If you'd like to explore those warning signs in more detail, you can dive deeper into this topic at Are You A Due Diligence Vendor? | Deal Thinking and Strategic Navigation – Forge for Sellers
When Easy Should Make You Nervous
That deal permanently changed the way I think about sales cycles.
Most sellers love easy deals.
I understand why.
Easy feels efficient.
Easy feels productive.
Easy feels like you're winning.
But over time I've learned that easy can sometimes mean something else entirely.
When customers view you as a serious contender, they usually create friction.
They challenge assumptions.
They ask difficult questions.
They push for proof.
They scrutinize weaknesses.
They force you to defend your position.
Not because they dislike you.
Because they're considering choosing you.
Every meaningful purchase creates risk. The larger the decision, the more that risk matters. Customers who are genuinely evaluating you are often trying to understand what could go wrong after they sign.
That process naturally creates tension.
Which means the complete absence of tension should occasionally make you curious.
Not paranoid.
Curious.
Because sometimes the easiest deals are the ones where nobody is seriously considering changing course.
The idea that friction can actually be a healthy sign surprises many sellers because we've been conditioned to believe smooth always equals progress. In reality, some of the strongest buying signals show up as pushback, scrutiny, and difficult questions. That's one of the core ideas behind this week's lesson on recognizing the difference between being evaluated and simply being used to validate someone else's decision:
Are You A Due Diligence Vendor? | Deal Thinking and Strategic Navigation – Forge for Sellers
The Deal That Looked Worse But Ended Better
A few years later, I found myself in a situation that looked completely different.
This time we recognized the warning signs early.
Before the proof of value even started, we realized we weren't influencing the evaluation criteria. The questions being asked. The priorities being measured. The way success was being defined. None of it seemed connected to the unique strengths of our solution.
Someone else was shaping the process.
As we dug deeper, we discovered why.
The director running the evaluation wasn't a neutral evaluator at all.
He was the competition's champion.
Suddenly everything made sense.
The scorecard had effectively been written before the evaluation began. We were participating in the process, but we weren't influencing the outcome.
For a while, we tried to fight inside the existing framework.
That was a mistake.
The longer we stayed inside someone else's evaluation criteria, the further behind we fell.
Eventually we made a different decision.
We stopped trying to accelerate the process.
We started trying to change it.
That created friction.
A lot of friction.
We challenged assumptions. We questioned how success was being measured. We elevated conversations beyond the evaluation team. Most importantly, we found an executive who saw the business problem differently than everyone else involved in the process.
The deal became messy.
Political.
Uncomfortable.
At several points it felt like we were making the situation worse.
But something important happened.
The conversation changed.
The executive became our champion. The buying criteria shifted. The definition of risk changed. The things that mattered most suddenly aligned with our strengths.
And eventually we won.
Not because we performed better inside the process.
Because we changed the process itself.
The Real Question
Most competitive deals are won long before the evaluation begins.
The company that helps define success often gains an advantage that becomes difficult to overcome later. Once stakeholders agree on what matters, every vendor gets measured against that framework.
That's why one of the most useful questions I ask myself during a deal is simple:
What changes if we disappear tomorrow?
Not what happens to the project.
Not what happens to the timeline.
What changes if we're gone?
Does the customer rethink the decision?
Does an executive lose confidence?
Does the evaluation shift?
Or does everything continue exactly as planned?
In my experience, that single question reveals more about your true position in a deal than almost any qualification framework. If you're working a competitive opportunity right now, I'd encourage you to evaluate your own deals through that lens. You can explore the full lesson here:
Are You A Due Diligence Vendor? | Deal Thinking and Strategic Navigation – Forge for Sellers
The answer usually tells you more about your position than any forecast call ever will.
Because influence is measured by the impact of your absence, not the volume of your activity.
Stop Competing In The Process
The next time a deal feels unusually easy, resist the urge to celebrate too early.
Don't ask:
"How fast can I respond?"
Ask:
"What evidence do I have that we're influencing the decision?"
Because activity isn't progress.
Participation isn't control.
And some of the hardest losses you'll ever experience will come from deals that felt easy from the very beginning.
The goal isn't to become the most responsive vendor in the room.
The goal is to become impossible to remove from the decision.
That's when you're actually competing.