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In complex, multi-stakeholder sales, the business is rarely won at the point you’re invited into a formal process. By then, the direction has usually already been set. The real shaping happens earlier, when a problem becomes serious enough that doing nothing is no longer acceptable, and someone inside the organisation begins to move toward change.
Most sellers arrive after that moment, or worse, spend time trying to force it where it never existed. They increase activity, attempt to manufacture urgency, and wonder why progress feels heavy.
The difference isn’t effort. It’s selection.
The best don’t push their way into opportunities. They are pulled in. They recognise patterns across industries, across buying behaviour, and across their company’s wins. They know where decisions are already forming and place themselves there, early and upstream.
The same pattern is playing out in careers.
AI isn’t just changing how work gets done. It’s changing where value sits. Some roles will compress. Others will expand. Most people will respond by doing more of what has worked in the past, hoping it continues to hold.
It won’t.
The people who move ahead are already repositioning. They are not waiting for clarity. They are identifying where the market is going and placing themselves in that path before it becomes obvious.
What happens next, whether within your role or beyond it, follows the same principle.
You can continue to apply your effort within structures defined by others, or you can begin building something that reflects your own direction. That may sit inside your current role, or extend beyond it.
Either way, the decision is the same.
The work is not to do more.
It’s to choose better.
Aaron