Scoring a deal honestly

The evidence standard, not the feeling

A RAG score is only useful if red, amber and green mean the same thing to everyone. The standard here is deliberately harsh: the purpose of scoring is to find work to do, not to feel good.

• Green — externally verifiable. You could show a sceptical stranger something that isn't your opinion: a customer document, a named person you met, a date in a diary, a number they produced.
• Amber — asserted but untested. The only source is you, one person, or an inference. A name with no meeting behind it. A number you modelled.
• Red — unknown, or known and bad. No answer; or an adverse one — criteria written for a competitor, a champion with no power, no budget line.

The single most important rule: unknown is red, not amber. Reps default to amber for things they haven't checked, because amber feels like partial credit. It isn't. "I don't know who signs" and "I know who signs and she's leaving" are both red, and both generate work.

The forcing rules

Do not average the eight letters. An average produces a comforting middling score and hides the one thing that will kill the deal. The letters are not equal.

Three gates. Red on any makes the whole deal red, whatever else is green:

1. Identify pain — nothing is driving change, so the status quo wins by default.
2. Economic buyer — no route to the money, so the project cannot be funded even if everyone likes it.
3. Champion — nobody is carrying the case internally, so momentum decays between your meetings.

Two risk multipliers. Paper process and Competition rarely lose a deal alone but wreck the forecast: paper process moves the date, competition the outcome. Red on either means the deal may be real but is not commitable.

Three execution letters. Metrics, Decision criteria and Decision process are where a seller creates advantage rather than discovers it. Amber here is normal early, inexcusable late.

Stage-appropriate expectations

Score against the stage, not perfection. Red on Paper process is fine in discovery, a crisis in negotiation:

Re-score at every stage change and after any material event — a reorganisation, a departure, a budget freeze, a new name on an email thread. A score more than three weeks old is decoration.

Worked scorecard 1 — a clean deal

Northbrook Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech, buying a laboratory informatics platform. Approximately £310,000 over three years. Stage: business case.

What would you do next. Close the two open MSA clauses this week — the paper process is all that stands between this deal and a predictable close date. Then protect it: confirm the board date in writing, get a second contact inside QA, and ask the champion directly what could still go wrong. Clean deals are lost to complacency far more often than to competitors.

Worked scorecard 2 — the fake champion

Calder Vale NHS Foundation Trust, digital pathology. Approximately £240,000 over three years. Stage: evaluation.

What would you do next. Run one decisive test rather than adding stakeholders at random. Ask the pathologist: "To move this forward we need twenty minutes with whoever signs at this value — can you set that up, or should we find another route?" If she can, she may be a developable champion; if she can't, she is a coach, and you recruit the pathology service manager, who has board history and owns turnaround times. In parallel, work the pain from a departmental log towards something with a consequence attached. Give it four weeks; if there is still no access to power, downgrade to nurture and say so out loud.

Worked scorecard 3 — looks great, no paper process

Kestrel Pharma, global analytics platform. Approximately £600,000 over two years. Stage: negotiation, forecast to close this quarter.

What would you do next. First, tell the truth internally this week, before anyone else discovers it: won, will not sign this quarter, here is the evidence and the revised date. Volunteering a slip is survivable; being found out is not.

Second, run the paper process like a project — named owners in legal, security and supplier onboarding; realistic queue lengths rather than targets; validation package and insurance uplift started in parallel rather than in sequence; the champion asked to sponsor internal urgency, because their influence works on their own legal team too; and a mutual close plan reviewed weekly. The premium lesson: the letter that decides whether you win and the letter that decides when are not the same letter.

Field note

Watch what happens to a deal like Kestrel at the end of a real quarter. The pressure is not to fix the paper process — it is to keep the deal in the number for two more weeks while someone tries a miracle. Reps who cave deliver the bad news on the last day, when it is maximally damaging and no longer credible. The ones trusted for years said in week three, in writing, "this is won and will sign next quarter", and then made that date. Forecast honesty is built on unglamorous deals nobody is watching.