Have You Ever Screwed Up a Deal?

Hello monkeys!!

Been a while since I posted! So a friend of mine forwarded this interesting article from Forbes to me.

I'll give you guys a quick snippet:

I lost one-quarter of my projected revenue for the entire year in a single phone call, I dealt with losing my company’s biggest deal like a snotty, spoiled, little crybaby.

I guess from a scale 1 to 10, this guy fucked up quite hard.

The moment a project finally makes it past the development and budgeting stages with the network is when I start counting on it for revenue. However, this failed deal was one of those rare times when a very lucrative and important chicken I’d counted on didn’t hatch.

My partner on this particular project was a wildly successful bigwig producer and she’d just had lunch with the head of the network.

“So how did it go?” I eagerly questioned.

She simply replied, “They’re going to cancel the project.”

I ruminated over the previous 8 months on the project. Where did I go wrong? The painful truth is there’s really nothing else I could’ve done creatively to get this project over the goal line. Seemingly random cancellations are part of the risk of selling network television series. But I was already counting on this project and my passionate belief it was going to happen didn’t allow me to consider that it might not.

So monkeys, from Brant's story here, have y'all encountered the same thing? Going through the extensive due diligence process - only to have the client pull out at the very last moment.

What'd you guys do? Negotiate further? Drink your sorrows down the drain?