When were you discussing this with them?

My recommendation was to stay involved since I built the relationship with the CEO, which is challenging, and it would have helped us win the business. I'm bilingual, and it made sense for me to stay involved, but they insisted on handing it off to the German office. Their business model required us to develop our own leads, and by year three, they lost most client partners because we ran out of runway. With only 50 companies, if they didn't want to buy from you, you had no choice but to upsell, which not every client wanted to do. So, you end up running out of runway.

The same goes for a Salesforce course or other tech software products. It's about the value proposition. For example, if you're doing this on a spreadsheet, trying to track expenses and upload receipts, you could use software to do it for you. It's a straightforward concept to explain.

Exactly. Instead of focusing on cultural nuances and trust journeys, you need to understand why there's an erosion of trust and what it means for your business. These are deep business conversations that require savvy and senior individuals. My clients were chief HR officers of Fortune 100 companies, so you need to have those business conversations and translate that into a learning journey, designing a solution around it.

The same goes for a Salesforce course or other tech software products. It's about the value proposition. For example, if you're doing this on a spreadsheet, trying to track expenses and upload receipts, you could use software to do it for you. It's a straightforward concept to explain.

You're really selling the invisible and developing a value proposition that helps their business become more profitable, safer, or have better employee engagement. These are fundamentally different conversations. If you lead with technology, as many did when they bought Strive and developed technology as a supposed solution, it doesn't work. The rollout was botched and embarrassing, quite frankly, and confusing. Technology alone won't sell hundreds of thousands of dollars in engagement.