When you do not tell your story, somebody else tells it for you. And they choose the columns.
I did not lose that pitch. There was no pitch.
Belgium, the mid-nineties. Skikot was a few years old, a student ski trip business run by students, and I was selling to associations in every university city in the country. Two of the largest had travelled with us the year before. They had been happy. I had the renewal conversation with both the way you talk about something already decided, and I moved on to the next city.
Weeks later I was working down the list of confirmed groups and they were not on it. Signed elsewhere. Done.
Four or five buses. Around two hundred students. Fifteen to twenty percent of the year.
That was not the damage.
The damage was doubt.
Two groups who had been with us, who had loved it, gone without a word. So the questions start. Did they not actually like it? Were they just being kind last spring? Should we drop the price? Is something broken in this business that everybody can see except me?
And the worst one. How many more am I going to lose without ever knowing why?
In sales, doubt is the killer. Not losing. Doubt. You carry it into the next meeting and everyone in the room can feel it. You start to believe your competitor has found some kryptonite against you, and you have not even seen it yet.
It did not kill us. We were stubborn and we had put everything into it, and that carried us through. But I sold badly for months.
The customer was us
Skikot ran on one rule that was almost too simple to say out loud. The customer was us. We built the trip we wanted to be on.
So the whole week was designed for one thing. Connection. Ski lessons given by fellow students instead of hired instructors. Activities arranged so that anyone who arrived alone did not stay alone. Evenings we ran ourselves, and had a blast running them. And on arrival day, while everyone was up on the mountain, we carried the luggage into the apartments. People came off a ten hour bus ride, picked up a key at the bar over a beer, and walked into a room where their bags were already waiting.
None of it was an accident. All of it was on purpose.
And none of it was written down anywhere a stranger could read it.
That is the biggest mess I have ever made.
We should have made the promise, and then delivered on it. We only ever did the second half.
A promise you do not voice is a promise anybody can claim. That is how you become a sitting duck for the companies with a better front. They never have to beat what you do. They only have to say it first.
They chose the columns
I found out later what our competitor put in front of those committees. Detailed pricing set against ours. Photographs of the season before. And a comparison sheet, us in one column and them in the other.
They positioned themselves as the Skikot alternative.
It took me years to read that properly. Their whole pitch was built on our name. We were the benchmark. We had defined what a good student ski trip was, so completely that the only way to sell against us was to claim to be the same thing.
And we lost, because the comparison sheet was the only document in the room, and it was not ours.
When you do not tell your story, somebody else tells it for you. And they choose the columns.
So why did I never say any of it out loud?
Not humility. Not contempt for marketing either.
I had the best story in that market and the only place I ever printed it was on a t-shirt.
Everyone went home wearing one. Skikot, and the names of three resorts. To the people who had been on that trip it meant a week they would talk about all year. To everyone else it was a word.
Run by students who were on the trip with you, against a travel agency repackaging a week in the Alps for a customer it had never once been. That is a perfect thing to say. I was living it and I never once wrote it down where a stranger could read it.
Because I believed, the way most builders believe at some point, that a true story tells itself.
It does not. Somebody has to tell it, and the only person who could tell ours was me.
Every engineer and every manufacturer I have met in the thirty years since carries a version of this belief. The product will sell itself because it is the best. It will not. The product does not talk.
The relief
A year later, a new person on one of those committees asked me quite openly whether choosing us meant his trip would be free.
I pulled the thread and it came apart. The decision makers had been given free trips. Against every student body code, and against ours, which is exactly why it had never occurred to us.
Here is the part I will not dress up. My first feeling was relief.
Not anger. Relief. Because it meant the business was sound.
Which tells you what the doubt had cost me. I had spent a year quietly wondering whether we were still any good, and news that somebody had bought the decision arrived as good news.
We talked about it inside the company and we swallowed it. What we took from it was not outrage. It was an education in how complex sales actually works. The influencers and the decision makers are not the whole game, but they are essential players. And you can make those people feel important without going anywhere near what our competitor did.
The cold start
Last week I wrote that the paint is not the problem, the wall is. Robert Skuba put the other case in the comments, and he was right.
Sometimes the wall is excellent and twenty years of bad paint is hiding it. A prospect cannot see your service desk. They cannot see how you handle a bad week. They cannot see the craft. They see your presentation, sitting beside four others.
Which is when I finally understood my own sentence about Skikot. We were brilliant once you knew us. We were nothing at all at the moment somebody was choosing for the first time.
That is not a quality problem. It is a cold start problem, and it is a completely different thing to fix.
The worst thing that could have happened
We won both associations back the following year. The students pushed for it. They had seen both trips from the same bars and they wanted ours.
I used to call it the Skikot forcefield.
Winning them back was the worst thing that could have happened to me.
It confirmed the wrong lesson. Stay the course, be better, and they come back. That is true. It is also a trap. It is slow. It hands the first move to whoever is loudest. It pulls you into a fight you never wanted. And the whole time, you get to tell yourself you are being principled.
There were three lessons in that season, and for years I had them in the wrong order.
The smallest one first. I walked into that renewal like a formality, because eight or nine out of ten groups came back every year. Under-prepared, no follow up, no close. It knocked me flat and it has never happened again. I am now the most prepared person in any room I walk into on a real opportunity, and I have that season to thank for it.
I fixed that one inside a month.
The second took a job change. I changed nothing about how Skikot presented itself. Not one folder. The lesson arrived at my next job, in a pure business to business division of a large petroleum company. A business built on promises, marketing and relationships, all pulling in the same direction instead of sitting in separate rooms. Promises made out loud, and then kept.
That is where the light came on. Skikot did not rise because we were clever. We had found product market fit and we were riding a wave and enjoying the ride. We could probably have grown it five or ten times over if we had understood the fundamentals.
The third one took ten or fifteen years. That was the forcefield, and I believed in it long after I knew better.
The habit outlasted the belief
There is a type of company in every trade. Big words, a flashy website, events with more show than substance. They benchmark themselves against the quality company that under-markets itself, and claim to deliver the same thing. Their reputation is built on revenue, size and customer numbers. And they move on every three to five years, to a new company with a new flashy boat.
Beautiful is never the enemy. Flashy is.
I still run a version of the same bet I ran in the nineties. Let the customer try them. They will find out. They will come back.
They often do. But I lose the biggest ones on the way. The biggest ones are exactly where the facade companies go hunting, and promising. And picking up the pieces afterwards is slow, and expensive, and does not always end with the work.
Waiting to be discovered is not a strategy. It is a hope with a price, and the price is the deals you most want.
We have started to fix it. We market ourselves properly now. We prepare, and we say out loud what we actually deliver instead of assuming it is obvious. There is more to do.
And it is getting harder, not easier. The cost of building a convincing front has collapsed. Anyone can produce a website, a brochure and a year of content in an afternoon. The gap between looking good and being good has never been cheaper to fake, which puts the burden back on the people doing the real work to make it visible.
You could read all of this and say I lost to a bribe, and have built a marketing lesson on top of it thirty years later.
Fair. I will never know how much each of those two things weighed.
But here is what is not in doubt. They made a promise they could not keep.
We kept a promise I never made.
Only one of those two things was ever mine to fix.
w. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.
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