Enthusiasm, influence, and the ability to move a decision forward are not the same thing.

The best relationship in an account can quietly become the most misleading signal in it.

Your main contact responds quickly, shares information that would otherwise be hard to obtain, and seems genuinely convinced your solution is right. From your side of the table, they are the strongest supporter you could hope for.

Then the project reaches the approval stage — and management has other priorities, purchasing wants to look at alternatives, and your contact turns out to have less influence over the outcome than their enthusiasm suggested.

Support is not influence

A strong relationship creates real value: access to information, early warning, honest conversation about concerns. What it does not establish is how much weight the contact carries when the organization decides.

Someone can strongly support a proposal without having a role in budget allocation. They can understand every technical advantage while having little access to senior management. And — the situation most often missed — they can have real influence and still choose not to spend it on you.

Credibility is a budget

That last case deserves attention. Advocating for a supplier internally is not free. It draws on a limited balance of personal credibility — an investment that can grow if the advocacy succeeds, but that is put at risk either way.

Consider an engineer who has worked closely with a supplier on a new system. The enthusiasm is genuine. But moving the project forward means changing an established specification, convincing skeptical colleagues, and accepting a share of the responsibility if the decision turns out badly. Advocating internally puts credibility at stake: it can pay back if the project succeeds, and it still carries a cost if colleagues start seeing the engineer as the supplier's promoter rather than an independent judge.

Their support is real. Their willingness to pay for it may be limited.

A better predictor than enthusiasm

Past advocacy is one of the better indicators of future advocacy. Not "do they like us," but observable behavior:

• What has this person successfully pushed through internally before?

• Did they involve decision-makers on their own initiative, or only when asked?

• When they ran into internal pushback, did they share it with you and work through it — or let the project quietly slip off their agenda?

The answers describe two very different contacts: one who can carry a proposal into the decision, and one who can only describe the decision after it has been made.

From the book

Stakeholder specialization, internal influence and the difference between genuine support and effective advocacy are explored in more depth in Chapters 4 and 5 of Sales Between the Lines, including how champions and key contacts can change what visible enthusiasm actually means.