Companies don't sign. People do.

You were the low bid and the best fit on paper. The scoring sheet said so, and so did your references. Then a polite note arrived from the procurement group at a regional distributor: they were going another direction. A month later you hear why. The other vendor’s rep has had coffee with the operations director once a month for three years, and was the first call when the warehouse system went down on a Saturday.

The usual fix is a better proposal: tighter pricing, more references, a cleaner scoring matrix. In a large organization you learned org charts and approval chains, so you read the chart. The chart shows a title, and a person sits in it.

Why do I lose to someone who knows the person?

Every purchase a business or a government makes is decided by a person.

We hear the labels all day: B2B, B2C, B2G. The labels hide the fact that matters most. The deals you closed or lost were decided by a human being with a mission, a family, fears and wants, who trusted you or did not, and signed or did not. Organizations do buy through rules and panels, and people run the rules. In my experience, few sellers operate as if that were true.

I learned it early. I took an in-store customer service job at a large print company on purpose, because the account manager position above it was open: ten stores on one side of the freeway in my market. I earned it from the inside and then broke records with those accounts. The records came from walking into those stores, connecting with the people who ran them, and staying connected whatever our side was doing that week. Those accounts bought from a person they knew.

Go back to the distributor. The operations director may run on speed and gut, and decide by who picks up the phone on a Saturday. Your proposal was forty pages with a scoring matrix, built for a committee. The rival sent a three-line text with a photo of the part. Neither of you did anything wrong by your own standards. One of you formatted for the person who decides.

The market is made of these people. Money flows through them, and the flagship you read about in the paper is a building full of people making decisions.

What does “reading a person” mean?

It means learning how that particular person takes in information, decides and trusts.

Think of a tower controller working a student pilot and an airline captain in the same airspace. Same runway, same rules, same radio. The controller speaks slowly and plainly to the student, with fewer instructions at a time and a check that the message landed. With the captain, the controller uses short standard phrases and expects a crisp read-back. A controller who gave the student the captain’s rapid-fire clearance would be issuing perfectly good instructions that the pilot cannot absorb. Nothing is wrong with either pilot.

Your distributor proposal was the captain’s rapid-fire clearance sent to a pilot who needed it plain. Two buyers with the same title at companies of the same size can need different handling, and a seller who gives both the same package has told both of them that he did not look.

You were probably taught to treat people the way you want to be treated. In my experience that rule is well meant and outdated, because it assumes the other person flies your way. The upgrade is to treat people the way they want to be treated, if it is worth your time, energy and effort. Both halves matter. Learning someone’s style takes discovery and dedication, and deciding a person is not worth the effort is a legitimate call, as long as you choose the consequences with your eyes open. What you don’t get to do is skip the discovery and blame the person for the miss.

What is the tool?

The People Read from Chapter 18. You can use it freely.

For anyone you need to move, a buyer, a partner, a key hire, learn four things.

• How do they take in information (written, spoken, visual, numbers or story), and do they move fast or deliberately?
• How do they decide: alone, by committee, by precedent, by gut?
• What do they read as respect, and what do they read as disrespect?
• What throws them off: surprise, pressure, informality, ambiguity?

Keep the read in your own notes. It is for rooms and buyers, and it stays out of hiring. Read individuals and don’t paint groups.

What can you do this week?

Audit the last two years of your dead deals for logos.

1. Pull your lost and stalled deals from the last two years.
2. Strike through every company name and write the name of the person who made the decision. Where you cannot name the person, mark it. That is a category, not a prospect.
3. Count how many you could not name. That count is how often you were selling to a logo.
4. Take your one live deal and answer the four questions about the decider. If you cannot, your next contact is for discovery: a visit, a call to someone who works beside them, a question about how they like to receive proposals.
5. Reformat your next communication to fit their answers, and watch what changes.

Know the person, and the company comes with them.