Act Like You Can Sell
Five Roles in a Committee Sale
Almost no enterprise sale is a simple back-and-forth between two people. It's an ensemble piece, and treating it like one long conversation — simply repeated in more rooms — is one of the costliest mistakes an experienced seller can make.
In my experience, five roles recur often enough on committee sales to be worth naming individually. I've given each one a name from the stage rather than the org chart, because the theatrical label is usually more honest than the job title on their door.
The Protagonist
Your champion. Their stakes are personal: they need this decision to reflect well on their own judgment, publicly, long after the ink dries.
The Producer
Controls the budget and is rarely in the room. They approve or veto from outside the process, receiving your argument secondhand, through your champion. You're effectively writing dialogue for a character you may never meet.
The Chorus
Lives with the daily operational consequence of the decision and often has the least formal power and the most accurate information about whether it'll actually work. Dismissing them because they lack budget authority is one of the more reliable ways to lose a deal that looked secure on paper.
The Critic
Asks the question nobody else will. Treat them as an obstacle and they'll behave like one. Treat them as the person whose hard-won approval will convince the room, and they often become your most credible witness.
The Antagonist
Has a genuine interest in the deal not happening — a competing project, loyalty to the incumbent, general aversion to change — that no evidence will fully dissolve. You can't validate your way into an ally here. The realistic goal isn't conversion. It's neutralization.
A champion once forwarded me, by accident, the email chain she'd used to build internal consensus. Most of it survived in her own words, exactly as intended. One nuance about timing had flattened into a firmer promise than we'd actually made. I caught it and corrected the record before it reached the full committee.
Writing for an audience you'll never personally address isn't a one-time drafting exercise. It's a habit of checking whether the message that left your hands is still the message arriving in rooms you can't see.