the co-founder who wasn't on the call... selling to multiple decision makers

on today's team call, charles, emiliano, amir and i went through the deals that had gone quiet. a pattern jumped out.

they weren't stuck on price. they weren't stuck on the product. they were stuck on a person who had never been in the room.

the co-founder.

you know the moment. the call goes great. the founder nods along, asks good questions, says this is exactly what we need. then the follow up comes back with some version of let me run it by my co-founder. and the deal stops breathing.

on one pre-interview, someone asked a prospect who makes the decision. the answer was two words. my co-founder.

if you're selling to co-founders, or to any deal with multiple decision makers, this is the trap. you pitch one person and you expect them to carry your pitch, word for word, with all your energy, to someone who wasn't there. they won't. they can't. it's not their pitch.

and between co-founders, decisions are often fifty fifty. even when one has the ceo title, the other usually has an equal say on the decisions that matter, and they tend to decide by consensus. so you've spent your best hour convincing half a vote.

it's like proposing to someone through their best friend. even if the friend says it beautifully, it's not the same.

so charles started doing the obvious thing nobody does. inviting the co-founder directly to the call. not cc'd on a recap. invited, by name, to be there live.

the early results have been good. it turns out people like being included in decisions they're going to make anyway.

and it changes the call itself. two founders in the room push on different things. one asks about the product, the other asks about the cost, and you get to answer both objections live instead of guessing what got said over dinner that night.

it also tells you something before you spend another hour. a co-founder who won't join a thirty minute call is giving you an answer about priority. better to hear it now than in week six of follow ups.

we added a second question to our qualifying too. ask them their cac... what it costs them to acquire a customer.

the answer tells you a lot. if their cac is tiny, someone joked about a ten dollar cac, then whatever we do for them is never going to look worth it next to that number.

"their cac is low and they're probably not a good fit, to be fair."

and if they don't know their cac at all, that's a signal too. not a disqualifier on its own. but it tells you how much of the conversation is going to be teaching before it can be selling.

same call, smaller lesson from the plumbing side. we'd been running too many mailboxes on a single domain, and google flagged the volume. the rule of thumb we landed on is about twenty mailboxes per domain, not forty. even the infrastructure has a co-founder... somebody else whose opinion you didn't ask.

long term, as more tools make it easy to get a first meeting, the meeting itself gets cheaper. what stays expensive is the decision. and decisions are made by the people in the room. if the right people aren't there, it doesn't matter how good the meeting was.

if you want to see how we try to get the right people in the room from the start, it's all on the gtm page.

so look at your stalled deals this week. who's the person who never heard your pitch... and why haven't you invited them yet?