Here is a puzzle.  

The founder identifies a win-win, a partnership that will obviously benefit both sides. He prepares a logical presentation, calling out all the synergies as well as the shared risks. He organizes the pitch and gets a warm introduction to the other CEO so he is not coming in cold, a blind email, a shot in the dark, never heard of this person before.

The warm intro is critical. Let’s pause here a moment. How much money have you wasted on outbound phone calls? An entire industry promises to get you leads. They will learn your pitch, and they will hit the phones with passion and vigor — because they get paid to dial. 

If they get a lead, they get paid more. And if by some miracle the lead converts into a paying customer, they get paid more. Now remind me, what exact risk did the call center take? So this purported hot lead gets sent to your business development team, and they call said lead and they pitch — and often nothing happens. In fact, the statistic is only 1% to 3% convert.

Ah yes, leads.

At this point, I refer you once again to Glengarry Glen Ross: “The leads are weak,” says Shelley “The Machine” Levene.  That provokes the famous “coffee is for closers” speech.

But what leads really do is they give hope. I have been the founder/CEO more than seven times and besides trying to not run out of money, one of my main jobs is to give the team hope.

What is hope? Gretchen Gavett, managing editor of the Harvard Business Review, defines hope as “linking present action to a desired future, even when outcomes are uncertain and progress is uneven.”  Hope is not the same as optimism, which is the belief that things will get better, while hope is the sense “that I can make things better — and here’s how,” she writes.

Gavett identifies four forms of hope:

The mirage, or inflated hope.  That deal will never close; you are dreaming.
The North Star, which is mobilizing hope.  It is aspirational, where we are headed.  It is “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” The gold is up there.
The Incrementalist is stabilizing hope.  You tell the team you don’t have all the answers, but you ask them to keep trusting that you will find a way while they post their resumes on LinkedIn.
The death spiral. Hopeless. This one resonates for founders in startups, facing the grim reaper.

You remember Pauline. She was resting on the train tracks. Well, you know the Saturday serials. Ming never wins, because hope is always riding in the caboose.

This is a true story. I had already sent a letter to all the investors that the ballgame was over. Then two days later, the big $1 billion company that told us a week ago to pound sand called back and wanted one more look at our AI software.

Now here comes crazy hope. I tell the four geniuses on the tech team to stick around for one last shot at redemption. I will land the plane, get them jobs and sell the company. I just need to convince the other side that this is truly in their best interests and that I am not a used car salesman.

Hundreds of merger and acquisition stories have this same outcome. The companies are big — they have multiple layers of executives and multiple layers of lawyers who will explain the 29 pitfalls in the deal — and that is from just reading the first page of the proposal.

The CEO of the big company is in the Midwest, founded the company 20 years ago, has a very direct style, but admits he wouldn’t know a vector database from a carburetor. He’s a street guy. I can work with him.

His tech team has one last call with us. They finally admit, “We’ve never seen that before.” And with that, we have a deal. Rabbits, hats, whatever. 

Two weeks ago, we were willing to sell to the banjo player for $50,000, but this deal is a couple of million. Oh, and on the subject of hope — one more hope.

I hope it closes. 

Rule No. 832:  “Surprise me.” — Bob Hope’s final words

Senturia is a serial entrepreneur who invests in startups. Please email ideas to neil@askturing.ai