By Ipalibo Da-Wariboko — Aligned to Act | May 2026
There is a version of a meeting that most BD professionals have experienced but almost nobody talks about.
You walk in — or you join the call — and from the first sixty seconds, something is different. You are not searching for the right question to ask. You already know what matters to the person across from you, what they tried before it didn’t work, and what a good outcome looks like for them specifically. You are not managing the conversation. You are in it.
That feeling is not charisma. It is not a gift some people have and others don’t. It is the result of preparation done before you got there — preparation thorough enough that when the moment arrives, you are not thinking about what to say. You are just present.
This is the 90/10 rule. And it is the single clearest dividing line between the BD professionals who consistently close complex deals and the ones who work just as hard and wonder why the results are inconsistent.
What the 90/10 rule actually says
The rule is simple. Ninety percent of what determines whether a complex deal closes happens before you walk into the room. Ten percent happens in the room.
That doesn’t mean the ten percent doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. The relationship, the conversation, the moment when the person across from you finally says what they’ve been circling around — that is irreplaceable. No amount of preparation can substitute for genuine human connection.
But preparation is what makes the ten percent possible.
When you walk into a meeting having done the ninety percent — having mapped the stakeholders, understood the organizational dynamics, thought through the likely objections before they surface, built your point of view on what this person actually needs — you are free. You are not spending cognitive bandwidth on what to ask next. You are not half-listening while you mentally rehearse your next point. You are there, fully, for the conversation that matters.
The professionals who do the ninety percent don’t just close more deals. They have better conversations, build stronger relationships, and create the kind of trust that produces referrals, renewals, and the phone call out of nowhere that turns into the next opportunity.
What the ninety percent actually is
Preparation is an overused word. Most people use it to mean “I read their LinkedIn profile and skimmed their website.” That is not preparation. That is the minimum viable effort not to embarrass yourself.
Real preparation for a complex deal or a high-stakes meeting has five components. Each one builds on the last.
The stakeholder map. Who is actually involved in this decision? Not just your contact — the full picture. Who are the functional stakeholders whose domains are affected? Who is the authority holder with formal sign-off power? Who are the informal influencers your contact is managing internally? You do not need names for all of them. You need to know the shape of the room you are not in.
The organizational context. What is going on inside this organization right now? What are they trying to accomplish this quarter? What pressure are they under? What did they try before that didn’t work? Context is not background information — it is the lens through which everything your contact says in the meeting becomes legible.
The concern map. What are the most likely objections, hesitations, or deal-killers — and who do they belong to? The finance objection is different from the legal objection is different from the senior leader who hasn’t been briefed. Each one has a different shape and requires a different response. Knowing them in advance means you are not surprised when they surface. You have already thought through your answer.
The one question. Every high-stakes meeting has one question that, if asked well, opens the conversation up in a way nothing else can. It is usually not the question you planned to lead with. It is the question that comes from genuinely understanding what this person is trying to accomplish and what they have not yet said out loud. Finding that question before you walk in is the deepest form of preparation there is.
The clear ask. What is the one outcome you need from this conversation? Not the ideal outcome, the outcome you need. The next step that keeps the deal moving. Preparation without a clear ask produces good conversations that go nowhere. The ask is the point.
Why most people skip it
The honest reason most BD professionals don’t do thorough preparation is not laziness. It is time.
The preparation described above takes real work. For a major account or a high-stakes meeting, it might take an hour. For a deal in progress, it might take thirty minutes to pull together what you already know and add what you’ve learned since the last conversation. That is time that has to come from somewhere — and in a world where the pipeline is always full and the day is always shorter than it should be, preparation gets compressed into the five minutes before the call starts.
The second reason is that most people don’t have a structure for it. Preparation without a framework is exhausting and inconsistent. You never know when you’ve done enough, so you either over-prepare and still feel uncertain, or you under-prepare and hope the conversation takes care of itself.
The third reason — the one nobody says out loud — is that thorough preparation forces you to confront what you don’t know. The stakeholder you haven’t identified. The concern you can’t answer. The organizational dynamic you don’t understand. That discomfort is real. And it is also exactly the information you need.
What changes when you do it right
When the ninety percent is done, the ten percent — the meeting, the call, the conversation — feels different.
Not easier, exactly. Complex deals are complex. The conversation still requires judgment, flexibility, and genuine listening. But the quality of what you bring to it is different. You are not reacting. You are navigating.
The questions you ask land differently. Because they come from actual understanding, not from a script, they signal to the person across from you that you have done the work. That signal builds trust faster than almost anything else in business development. People can feel the difference between a professional who prepared for them specifically and one who prepared a standard pitch.
The objections you encounter don’t derail you. Because you anticipated them, you have already thought through your response. You can engage with the concern genuinely instead of scrambling.
And when something unexpected happens — when the conversation goes somewhere you didn’t plan — you have the context and confidence to follow it. Preparation doesn’t make you rigid. It makes you free.
A word on AI and preparation
I want to address something directly, because it is increasingly relevant to how BD professionals think about this problem.
AI tools can be genuinely useful in the preparation process. They can help you synthesize information, structure your thinking, and surface patterns across what you know about an account. Used well, they compress the time that preparation takes without reducing its quality.
But there is a version of AI use that does the opposite — that produces a generic briefing, a templated summary, or a set of talking points that could have been written for any account. That is not preparation. That is the appearance of preparation. And it produces all the wrong results: the meeting where you sound informed but aren’t present, the question that lands flat because it came from a template rather than genuine understanding, the relationship that never quite develops because the person across from you can feel that something is off.
The goal of preparation is not to be well-informed. It is to be present. The information is in service of that — and only valuable when it gets you there.
The ninety percent is yours to do. AI can help you do it faster. It cannot do it for you.
Where to start
If you are in an active deal or have a high-stakes meeting coming up, start with one question: do I know the full shape of the room I’m not in?
Not just your contact — the stakeholders beyond them. The concerns that live outside the conversation you’ve been having. The person whose hesitation you haven’t prepared for because you didn’t know to look.
If the answer is no, that is where the preparation begins.
The deal doesn’t close in the room. It closes in the preparation that happened before it.
A2A was built for this — a preparation platform for relationship-driven BD professionals. If you have a deal in progress or a high-stakes meeting coming up, see how it works.
Ipalibo Da-Wariboko is the founder of Aligned to Act — a preparation platform for professionals who win business through relationships.
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