Fighting the Good Fight For Your Partners

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What a senior defense executive taught me about the internal battle your champion is having on your behalf, and why most companies never think to ask what it is actually costing them.

About two years ago, I sat down with a senior leader at a major defense contractor.

She is on her company’s executive leadership team. Decades of experience navigating one of the most politically complex environments in American business. She knows her stuff.

We were supposed to be talking about an upcoming speaking engagement we were both participating in. The conversation drifted (the way the best ones always do), and we ended up talking about teaming, partnerships, and how she brings new companies into her organization’s pursuit ecosystem.

She paused before she answered.

Then she said something that should not go unnoticed.

It can also be a factor that shows up when we don’t want it to.

The sell internally is so much harder than the sell externally.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you?

What does this mean? Harder can mean so many things.

Longer? More people involved? Political? More paperwork? Compliance? More meetings?

What do you mean?

There are layers to it. Understanding their expectations and their environment helps you understand what they might be walking into every time they are there to champion you internally at their organization.

What we see from our perspective is not always what your partner sees.

Let’s dance.

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Dukes Up

She had spent eight months getting one company approved to work with her team. Not eight months of formal procurement. Eight months of internal resistance, stakeholder navigation, and organizational friction that the partner on the outside never saw and would never fully understand. Her program managers did not want changes. Her BD team did not want changes. Her account managers did not want changes. Everyone had a reason to say no that had nothing to do with the quality of the partner she was fighting to bring in.

She fought anyway. The company came in and delivered. Absolutely crushing it, in her words.

I asked her about the next opportunity and whether she would be going through the same process to bring in new partners.

The look on her face answered the question before she said a word.

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Check Out Past Issues

Don’t forget to check out some of my past issues here:

Stop Blaming the Proposal for a Loss the Relationship Already Decided 

When Loyalty Becomes a Liability: The Hidden Risk in Long-Term Clients 

If Your Team Wouldn’t Buy It, Why Should Your Customers 

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Silience

What this actually meant

Most BD leaders and partnership teams interpret silence from a potential partner organization as one of two things.

• The opportunity is not moving forward.

• The interest was never as strong as the initial conversation suggested.

Almost never do they consider what was written on that executive’s face.

That someone inside that organization is actively fighting for them right now, in rooms they will never be invited into, at a personal cost they will never fully see, and that the silence is not indifference.

It is the sound of a champion calculating exactly how much of themselves they can afford to spend before the fight starts costing more than they can recover from.

Because here is what most companies never understand about the person advocating for them on the inside.

Your champion is not just selling your capabilities to their organization. They are betting their own credibility on you. Every time they push back against a program manager who does not want changes, every time they have a difficult conversation with a BD leader who has loyalty to an existing vendor, every time they go to their own leadership and make the case for bringing in someone new, they are spending something that took years to accumulate and cannot be quickly replenished.

And they are doing all of it for a partner who has not yet had the chance to prove inside that organization that the bet was worth making.

Think about what that actually feels like from the inside. If the partner you fought for underdelivers, every person who pushed back on you gets to say they were right. Your judgment gets questioned. The relationships you strained to make this happen now carry a different kind of tension. The next time you want to advocate for something, the room remembers the last time you asked them to trust you.

That vulnerability is what the silence on your end is actually protecting. Not indifference. Self-preservation dressed as patience.

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Uncomfortable

If your champion is managing their political capital this carefully, and if the internal fight is as costly as that executive described it to me, then the companies that win and sustain the best long-term partnerships are not necessarily the ones with the strongest capabilities on paper.

They are the ones that make their champion’s internal fight easiest to win and least costly to sustain over time.

Capability gets you considered. Champion protection is what keeps you in.

Most companies invest enormous resources in making their external case stronger. The capability statement. The past performance record. The technical approach. All of it important. None of it addresses the specific objections a program manager raised in a meeting your champion had last Tuesday that you will never know happened.

The companies that understand this dynamic invest just as seriously in making their champion’s internal case airtight. They anticipate the objections before they surface. They provide the evidence their champion needs to win conversations they are not in the room for. They perform in ways that make the next internal fight easier to start because the last one ended with a result nobody can argue with.

That is not relationship management. That is strategic awareness of where partnership success is actually determined.

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Cost

What the eight months really cost

My conversation with that executive made something super clear that most partnership models never account for.

• The internal sell has a cost that does not show up in any budget or timeline. It is personal.

• It costs your champion political capital that took years to accumulate.

• It costs organizational goodwill that gets spent down with every conversation they have on your behalf.

• It costs the kind of energy that experienced leaders conserve carefully because they have learned exactly how finite it is and how long it takes to rebuild.

When a champion spends eight months bringing one company in, and that company delivers, the outcome justifies the investment. The relationships strained in the process begin to repair. The credibility spent starts to return.

You can interpret this as people looking at failure more than success. Weighing risks over opportunity.

But when the next opportunity comes, and a new partner needs consideration, that champion is not starting from zero. They are starting from whatever they have left after the last fight. And that calculation- how much do I have left- is happening completely out of sight of the partner waiting on the outside for an answer.

That look on my client’s face was not reluctance about the next partner. It was the honest accounting of someone who had just finished one of the most draining internal processes in their professional toolkit and was not yet sure they had enough left to start another one.

All for people pushing back for no real reason at all.

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Confidence

Most companies never know their champion felt that way.

Most companies never think to ask.

What this should change about how you show up

The most common mistake BD and leadership teams make when a promising partnership goes quiet is to increase outreach pressure. More follow-up emails. More check-in calls. More requests for updates on timeline and next steps.

All of it well-intentioned. Most of it counterproductive.

Because what it signals to a champion navigating a politically sensitive internal process is that the partner on the outside does not understand the environment they are operating in. And a champion who is already spending credibility to bring you in does not need the additional burden of managing your impatience while they do it.

What they need from you during the silence is confidence. The quiet, demonstrated certainty that when they do get you in the room, you will perform at a level that makes every internal conversation they had on your behalf look like the smartest thing they ever did.

Because when the pushback comes (and it always comes), the strength of the case they are making for you is the only thing standing between you and another eight months of waiting. Make that case easy to win. Anticipate the objections. Deliver evidence that removes the risk from their bet before they are asked to defend it.

Your champion’s credibility is the door. How you perform is what keeps it open.

Your One Action Item

Think about your most important active partnership conversation right now. The one where the silence has stretched longer than you expected.

Before you send another follow-up, answer one question honestly.

• Do you know specifically what objections your champion is facing internally on your behalf right now, and have you given them everything they need to win those conversations without you in the room?

If the answer is no, that is where your energy belongs. Not in the follow-up. In making the internal fight your champion is carrying so easy to win that the pushback has nowhere credible to go.

Because that fight is happening right now, whether you know about it or not.

The least you can do is make sure they are not fighting it alone.

See you next week.

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Whenever You’re Ready, Here are 4 Ways I Can Help You:

1. Unlocking Hidden Potential – Reconnecting with Past Clients for Explosive Growth – Check out my free eBook on how you can find hidden gems in your past clients and help you crush your sales goals.

2. AI for Business Development – Download our free eBook on how you can effectively leverage AI prompts to your advantage. From properly setting up your preferred AI tool, to how to shape your prompts, save time, and get the outputs you are looking for.

3. Sales Resources at Your Fingertips – From tools, tips, demos, and how-tos, check out our Pages and content that can provide you with additional support, whether it be social selling, account management, or something else.

4. Cribworks Advisor Program – Want more than just resources? Reach out to me and see if our Advisor Program can help you scale your business.

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