"There's a New VP Starting — Everything's On Hold" — The Leadership Change Stall

A rep forwarded me an email last month that said, in full: "Thanks for your patience — we've got a new VP of Network Operations starting in three weeks, so everything's on hold until she gets settled. I'll circle back."

He asked me what the objection handle was. There isn't one. That's the problem.

Most stalls you hear are stories. "No budget" usually means no priority. "Send me something in writing" usually means I don't want to keep talking. "Q1" usually means never. You handle those by getting underneath them, because the surface statement isn't the real thing.

A leadership change is different. A new VP genuinely is arriving. Decisions genuinely are freezing. Your buyer genuinely cannot sign right now, and pushing them to try makes you the vendor who doesn't understand how companies work. It's one of the few stalls where the buyer is telling you the truth.

Which is exactly why it kills more deals than the fake stalls do.

Why a true stall is more dangerous than a false one

When a rep hears a false objection, they fight. They dig. They get their manager on the phone. Something happens.

When a rep hears a true one, they go polite. They write "understood, completely makes sense, I'll follow up in a month," they push the close date out a quarter, and they go work something else. They feel good about it. They were respectful of the customer's situation.

And then ninety days later the deal is gone, and not to a competitor who out-sold them. It's gone because the new VP walked in with a mental list of things she already trusts. She ran a network ops org somewhere else for four years. She bought a monitoring stack there. She had a vendor rep she liked. Week two, in a one-on-one, somebody says "we were mid-evaluation on a couple of tools," and she says "before we go further, let me get someone in here I've worked with."

That's the whole mechanism. It isn't a competitive loss. It's a default. The new exec fills the vacuum with what she already knows, and you weren't in the room when the vacuum formed.

I have watched this happen from both sides. Selling inside big companies, I have been the incoming person's problem — the in-flight project from the previous regime that nobody could articulate a reason for. And I have been the rep who went quiet for six weeks out of politeness and came back to a fully formed decision I had no part in.

So the working assumption is this: a leadership change stalled deal is not paused. It's reopened. Every assumption is back on the table, including the ones you'd already won. Treat the freeze as the start of a new sales cycle with a new buyer, not as an intermission in the old one.

First question: does your buyer survive the reorg?

Before you do anything clever, find out whether the person you've been selling to still exists in the new org chart in three months.

There are basically four outcomes and they call for completely different behavior.

Your contact is safe and gets a new boss. The most common one. Their job doesn't change, their reporting line does. They keep operational authority but lose budget authority for anything above a small number. This is workable, but the deal now has to be re-sold upward to someone who has never heard of you.

Your contact was the outgoing exec's person and is now exposed. They were hired by the leader who left, they were championing this project as part of that leader's agenda, and the new VP is arriving with skepticism about everything that came before. Your champion's endorsement is now a liability. Not neutral — a liability. Anything tagged as "the last guy's initiative" gets deprioritized on arrival.

Your contact is leaving too. Sometimes it's public, usually it isn't yet. If the exec left and their direct reports start updating LinkedIn headlines, you are selling to people who will not be there at signature.

Your contact is being promoted into the gap or is a candidate for it. Rare but wonderful. If they're acting VP or in the running, they are desperate for a visible win and you may be it.

You cannot guess which one you're in. You have to ask, and you have to ask in a way that doesn't sound like you're asking whether they still have a job. Here's roughly how I do it:

"Can I ask something a little blunt? When Dana starts, does this project still sit with you? I'm not asking to keep the deal alive — I'm asking because if it's moving to someone else, I'd rather get them what they need early than have them inherit a half-finished evaluation from a vendor they've never met."

That framing works because it hands them a reason to answer honestly that has nothing to do with your commission. And the answer is diagnostic. "Yes, it's still mine, I'll just need her sign-off" is a very different deal than "honestly, I don't know what the structure looks like yet."

The second answer is not bad news, by the way. It's good news delivered early. It means you have a few weeks to prepare for a buyer who doesn't know you exist, instead of finding out in month three.

What to do with a champion who just lost their authority

This is the part reps get wrong most consistently, and it's a relationship problem, not a sales problem.

A champion who has just been reorged under a new boss is in a strange emotional place. They were the decision-maker. Now they're a recommender. Some of them are embarrassed about it. Almost all of them are cautious, because in the first ninety days of a new leader they are being evaluated, and the last thing they want is to walk into a new VP's office advocating hard for a vendor and get asked a question they can't answer.

If you push that person to "get us in front of the new VP" in week one, you're asking them to spend political capital they don't have yet. Many of them will just stop replying, because avoiding you is easier than explaining.

What actually works is inverting the ask. Stop asking your champion to sell for you. Start asking your champion to help you make them look good to their new boss.

Concretely, that sounds like: "I don't want you carrying this into her office in week one. What I'd rather do is give you something you can hand over when she asks what's in flight — one page, the problem, what we found in the assessment, what it'd cost, what happens if it waits. No logo on it if you'd prefer. If she wants to talk to us after that, great. If not, you've still got a clean answer to a question she's definitely going to ask."

That's a real thing you should build. One page. Written in the customer's language, not yours. Their metrics, their numbers, their words from discovery. The business problem stated first and your product mentioned late, if at all. A new exec asks every direct report some version of "what's on your plate and what do you need from me" in the first month. Your champion having a crisp answer to that makes them look organized. Your champion having a vendor deck makes them look sold-to.

And if the champion is genuinely exposed — the outgoing exec's person, now on thin ice — you need to know that you cannot rely on them and you need a second thread into the account. Not behind their back. Alongside. "Given everything that's moving, is there someone else on the team I should be keeping in the loop so this doesn't live and die on your inbox?" Most people say yes to that, because it takes work off them.

The research move: find out what the new VP bought last time

Here's where you get an edge, and almost nobody does it.

The new exec is a public figure for your purposes. Their LinkedIn tells you where they came from, how long they were there, what their title progression looked like, and often what they were responsible for. That's the starting point, not the finish.

What you actually want to know is what their last environment looked like. If she ran network operations at a mid-size carrier for four years, then her instincts were formed there. What tooling does that company use? Sometimes their engineering blog tells you. Sometimes their job postings tell you — job descriptions list the stack. Sometimes their conference talks tell you, and those are usually on YouTube. Sometimes a vendor's own case study page names them.

This tells you three enormously useful things.

First, who your real competitor is. It probably isn't whoever you were bracketed against in the original evaluation. It's whatever she used last, because that's the reference point every option gets measured against.

Second, what she'll assume is normal. If she came from an environment with mature automation and lands somewhere manual, she's going to be shocked by the current state and hungry for change. If she came from somewhere less mature, she may look at your project and think this is a luxury.

Third — and this is the one that actually moves deals — what she got promoted for. Executives repeat the play that worked. If her last role's visible win was consolidating tools, she's going to consolidate here. If it was reliability, she's going to chase reliability. Your job is to figure out which story she's going to tell in her first board review and become part of it.

When you eventually get the meeting, that research is what lets you run a real conversation instead of a re-demo. You're effectively doing discovery from scratch with a more senior person, which is a different skill than the discovery you ran with the manager six weeks ago. The structure I use for that is the same one in the energy and utilities discovery playbook — current state, what it costs them to stay there, who else feels it — just compressed, because you'll get less time.

Position as the incoming exec's early win, not the outgoing exec's leftover

Every new executive is looking for something to point at in their first ninety days. They need a win that is visible, attributable to them, and not too dependent on other people's cooperation.

Your project is either that or it's clutter. There's no middle.

The language matters more than it should. "We've been working with Marcus's team since the spring on the assessment" tags you to the old regime instantly. Say instead: "Your team has a problem with X. Here's what we found when we looked at it. Here's what fixing it in the first half looks like." Present tense, their team, their timeline. The history is just how you happen to know the details.

Be willing to change the shape of the deal, too. If you had a big multi-year proposal sitting with the outgoing exec, an incoming exec will often not sign it — not because it's wrong but because signing a large commitment in month two on someone else's evaluation is a bad political move. Offer the smaller first phase. A scoped pilot with a defined outcome is something a new VP can approve without owning the whole decision. You lose contract value now and you keep the account. I would take that trade every time.

The 60-day re-entry sequence

Here's the cadence I'd run. It's deliberately unhurried, because the thing that kills you here is being the vendor pestering an exec during their first two weeks.

Week one, before the start date. Work the champion. Get the org-chart answer. Build the one-pager. Confirm the actual start date, not the rumored one. Do the research on the new exec. Nothing goes to the new person yet.

Weeks two and three, their first weeks in seat. Silence toward the exec. Genuine silence. They are in onboarding, meeting seventy people, and every vendor in the market is emailing them. Being the one who doesn't is worth something. Meanwhile you're staying warm with the working-level people who will be asked to evaluate anything anyway.

Around day thirty. First direct outreach. Not a re-introduction of your company. A point of view about their new environment, informed by the research. This is a cold call to a senior person who didn't ask for it, and the mechanics are the same as any other — earn the next thirty seconds with the first ten, lead with the problem, not the product. If you want the structure I'd use, it's the one in the telecom cold call script for CTOs and heads of network ops, adapted to what you know about where she came from.

Something like: "Dana, Tim from — you don't know me. I've been working with your team on the outage-triage problem since before you joined. I'm not calling to restart a sales process on you in week four. I'm calling because I saw what you built at your last company and I think what's here is about eighteen months behind that, and your team already knows it. Worth fifteen minutes?"

Days forty to sixty. If you get the meeting, run discovery, not a demo. Assume nothing carries over. Ask her what she's found in her first month, what she's been asked to fix, and by when. Then map your thing to her answer, and be honest if it doesn't map. If you don't get the meeting, you keep working the level below and you wait for the reorg to finish, because org charts settle around the sixty-to-ninety day mark and new budget conversations start right after.

The same stall on a renewal

Everything above applies to new business. It applies harder to renewals, and reps take it far less seriously there, because renewals feel safe until the week they aren't.

When the sponsor who bought your product leaves, your renewal is at risk regardless of how the product is performing. The person who understood why you were purchased is gone. What remains is a line item with a number next to it, in a spend review, in front of someone with no emotional investment and a mandate to look sharp on cost.

The fatal version is when the new exec asks "what is this and why do we pay for it," and the remaining users say "I think the old team set that up." That answer ends contracts.

So the move on a sponsor departure is to rebuild the business case for a person who was not there when it was made. Fresh usage data. What broke before you and hasn't since. Named people internally who would be angry if it went away. And you do it early — the moment you hear about the departure, not at renewal minus thirty. A save call you start six weeks out is a different, much worse conversation, which is exactly the situation the SaaS renewal save-call script is built for, and the insurance version for a carrier already halfway out the door if your account has drifted further than that.

The short version

A new exec is the only stall I know of that is completely true and completely temporary and still loses you the deal.

So don't argue with it and don't accept it either. Find out if your buyer survives. Arm your champion with something that makes them look competent rather than sold-to. Learn what the new VP bought last time, because that's your real competitor. Re-enter at day thirty with a point of view, not a follow-up. And be willing to shrink the deal so it's an easy yes in someone's first quarter.

If I were coaching a rep through this today, the thing I'd actually make them do is practice the awkward part out loud — the blunt question to the champion about whether the project still sits with them, and the thirty-second opener to a VP who has no idea who you are. Those two are where the whole sequence works or falls over, and reading them on a page is not the same as saying them. That's what I built DrillCall for: running the same uncomfortable thirty seconds enough times that it comes out steady when the person on the other end actually matters.

The deal isn't dead. It just has a new buyer, and you have about sixty days to meet them before someone else does.