Resources

Why good deals stall for reasons that aren't in the deck.

Writing on commercial architecture for B2B SaaS and Enterprise AI scaleups. One framework for taking on a market leader, and a set of pieces on the places revenue actually gets stuck: the missing budget line, the sponsor's personal risk, the pilot that proves everything and funds nothing. Drawn from twenty years of enterprise deals, won and lost.

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The framework

The 7M Model

Seven moves for taking on a market leader you cannot out-build, run in strict order. Map the fortress, find the dependency it rests on, locate the fragility, weigh the motivation, pick the ground where their every defence costs more than yours, force the fork they cannot answer cheaply. Then the move most challengers skip: confirm the customer will actually move.

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Challenging a leader
Origin · Adobe and Figma

Don't attack the fortress.

Adobe offered twenty billion for the company beating it, then paid a billion to walk away. Figma never tried to out-Adobe Adobe. It changed the battlefield to ground the leader could not step onto. This is where the model came from.

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Applied · Pricing

They win the argument. They lose the sale.

AI-native challengers have six of the seven moves right against seat-based pricing. Then the deal stalls, and not on price. On the buyer's need to explain the price upstairs.

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From the other side of the fork
The leader's side · Shell, 1973

Fork yourself before the market does it for you.

Shell didn't predict the oil crisis, it had rehearsed it. Most leaders will point AI at efficiency, which is the wrong side of the fork: you make the current model cheaper at the moment a challenger makes it unnecessary.

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When the buyer is the obstacle
Applied · Budget

Your buyer has the money. Nobody owns it.

There has never been more enterprise AI budget and it has never been harder to reach. A line has an owner and one approval. A pot has holders, and none of them planned to spend it on you.

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Applied · The sponsor

Your champion has more to lose than to gain.

Back a new agent and a failure has their name on it. Back nothing and nobody asks. A better payback number raises the company's upside, and the company's upside was never the problem.

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Applied · Pilots

A successful pilot can be the worst thing that happens.

A proof of concept ends in a funded project. A pilot ends in a report. Six months, real savings, nobody arguing with the findings, and no decision waiting on the other side of it.

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From reading to finding

These are patterns. Yours are in your own records.

Everything above comes from deals I ran or watched. Useful as a lens, but it is still somebody else's data. The work starts by reading yours: which deals you actually win, what they share, and where the revenue is leaking. One question, one instrument, no charge.

Start with the free diagnostic