Next Quarter: A Sales Story — Chapter 3
Dev picked up his phone and started typing.
“Hi Dhruv. Don’t apologise, I’m glad you reached out. Here’s the honest truth: the people across that table aren’t looking for the most polished person in the room. They’re looking for someone real. Prepare well, then forget the script. Ask them something you actually want to know. Treat it like a conversation, because that’s all it is. You’re more ready than you think.”
He read it once more and hit send.
The next morning, Dev opened his CRM and stared at the deal. Next steps: “Awaiting procurement green light.” It had said that for three weeks.
He picked up the phone. Normally he’d have sent an email with a polite subject line, “Gentle follow-up,” and waited for a reply that never came. This time he called Darren directly.
Darren answered on the fourth ring. He sounded tired.
“Darren, it’s Dev. I’m not calling to chase you. I just wanted to check in. How are you doing?” This courage to pick up the phone and not be transactional was always in Dev, just hiding beneth layers of doubt, anxiety and fear. But he mustered the courage to ask anyway.
There was a pause, long enough that Dev wondered whether the line had dropped.
“Honestly? Not great,” Darren said. “We’ve had a reorganisation. My new boss came in from risk, and he’s put every new vendor on hold until they go through a full third-party risk review. Yours included. I should’ve told you weeks ago.”
“Yes, Darren that would have really helped me manage expectations internally. What stopped you from sharing then, were you hopeful the process would be faster somehow?”
Darren let out a breath. “Because I told you it was done. I didn’t want to be the guy who let you down.”
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Dev sat back. For three weeks he’d blamed procurement, and procurement had been one tired man, embarrassed and stuck between his vendor and his new boss.
“Darren, you haven’t let me down. Let’s work out how to get this through together. What does your new boss need to see, and can we get this prioritized?”
For the next twenty minutes they actually talked. Darren walked him through the review: the security questionnaire, the data residency questions, and the sign-off from the head of risk. It wasn’t quick, and there was no way it would close this quarter. But for the first time in weeks, Dev knew exactly where the deal stood.
Before they hung up, Darren said, “Thanks for asking how I was. Nobody’s asked me that in a while.”
Dev put the phone down and looked at the deal in his CRM. He deleted “Awaiting procurement” and typed: “Risk review initiated by new risk team.”
For a moment, he felt lighter. Then he opened the forecast sheet.
His quota sat at the top of the screen, the same number it had been yesterday. The bank deal was most of his quarter, and now it was gone, sitting in a column called “next” that nobody in leadership cared about.
Knowing where the deal stood didn’t change the number. His manager would still want a commit by Friday. The CRO would still ask what Dev was doing to close the gap. And at the end of the month, the mortgage would still come out of his account, whether the risk team liked his security questionnaire or not.
He did the maths again. Without the bank, he was at forty percent of target. Six weeks left. No other deal in his pipeline was big enough to fill the hole.
His chest tightened. He’d done the right thing with Darren. He knew that. But doing the right thing and hitting your number weren’t always the same thing, and only one of them showed up in his commission cheque.
He closed the forecast sheet, then opened it again, as if the number might have moved.
Then his phone buzzed. It was Dhruv.
“Thank you. I read your message five times. Could I buy you a coffee before my interview?”
