maneuver-construction.md

title: Maneuver construction description: (reference) The two-cycle observe/orient/decide/act structure — pre-mortem, go/no-go, verbatim opening, IF/THEN branches, and abort criteria — with worked examples.

Maneuver construction

How a codified blocker becomes something a rep can execute on Tuesday. Two cycles, four phases each: observe, orient, decide, act.

A maneuver is not a task list. It specifies what to watch for before moving, the reframe the move depends on, what it costs if it fails, the words to open with, what to do when the buyer pushes back, and the condition under which you stop.

The two-cycle structure

Cycle 1 addresses the single worst blocker. One. Not the three that scored −1 — the one that, if it stayed unresolved, would kill the deal first.

Cycle 2 either flanks that blocker or clears the highest-value unknown. It does not begin until cycle 1 reaches a defined exit state, success or abort.

Reps do not execute eight parallel plays. They execute one, and the second only exists so the artifact says what happens next rather than leaving them to improvise after the first move lands.

Phase 1 — Observe

What to watch for before acting. A maneuver launched on suspicion burns the move and teaches the buyer to expect it.

Trigger conditions — the specific, observable signals that confirm the blocker is real. Not "the champion seems less engaged" but "two consecutive meetings rescheduled by them, and the last two substantive questions went unanswered for more than four working days."
Confirming evidence — the lines in the context layer that established the −1.
Hold condition — the explicit instruction not to act until the triggers are confirmed.

Write triggers so that two people reading the same context layer would agree on whether they have fired.

Phase 2 — Orient

Why this approach and not the obvious one. Almost every blocker has an intuitive response that makes it worse: the champion goes quiet so you follow up harder; procurement stalls so you escalate; the buyer says you're expensive so you discount.

State the reframe the maneuver depends on, in one line — the shift in how the rep is thinking about the situation. Examples of the shape:

From asking for access to making the introduction serve the gatekeeper — a contact deflecting a request to meet their boss is usually protecting their own position, not blocking yours.
From proving value to removing risk — a buyer who agrees with the case and still hesitates is not unconvinced; they are exposed, and the exposure is personal rather than commercial.
From selling the outcome to selling the first ninety days — where the objection is implementation capacity, the case has to be about their effort, not your result.

Where the blocker has already survived a straightforward attempt and the deal was classified as a particular kind of contest, the reframe comes from that classification instead.

If you cannot state the reframe, you have a follow-up, not a maneuver. Send the follow-up and skip the ceremony.

Phase 3 — Decide

What must be true before this is allowed to run.

Why the rep should care

One line, in the rep's interest, not the company's. "Stops you getting stuck presenting to someone who cannot approve this" beats "improves qualification hygiene." A maneuver a rep does not personally want to run does not get run.

Pre-mortem

Assume the move has been made and it went badly. Answer two questions:

What is the worst realistic outcome? In complex deals the answer is almost always one of: a champion who feels bypassed and stops advocating, a stakeholder who feels their authority was violated, a premature "no" from someone who had not yet formed an opinion, or an internal politics problem the rep cannot see and now owns.
What is the mitigation, and where does it sit in the act phase? The mitigation must be inside the execution — a sentence in the script, a person told first, a sequencing choice. A mitigation written as a warning after the script is a warning, and warnings do not survive contact with a rep in a hurry.

The most common backfire is going over a contact's head to reach the economic buyer. The mitigation is almost never "don't" — it is bringing the contact with you, framed so that the introduction makes them look prepared rather than circumvented.

Go/no-go checklist

Four boxes, all of which must be checked:

The prerequisite fact this move depends on is confirmed (not assumed).
The stakeholder this targets is currently responsive.
The asset or material this move requires exists and is ready.
The political cost, priced by the pre-mortem, is smaller than the gain.

Any unchecked box sends you back to targeted discovery. An unchecked fourth box means the maneuver is wrong, not early.

Phase 4 — Act

Persona check

Before writing the script, check its register. It should read like someone diagnosing a business problem — direct, willing to name what is uncomfortable, focused on the buyer's outcome. It should not read like someone chasing a signature: no manufactured urgency, no gratitude for the buyer's time as an opening move, no stacked qualifiers.

The practical test: would a peer of the buyer's send this? If it reads as written by someone junior to the recipient, rewrite it.

The verbatim opening

Write the actual words — an opening line, a question, a short message. Not a description of what to communicate.

A rep given "reframe the conversation around cost of inaction" will not do it. A rep given a sentence they can say will say it, or will edit it into their own voice, which is the point. Two to four sentences is usually right; a script long enough to need reading is long enough to sound read.

Write one opening per maneuver, not per channel. If the channel changes the move materially, that is a different maneuver.

IF/THEN counter-moves

Two to four branches covering the responses you can actually predict:

IF the buyer deflects to a subordinate → THEN accept, and use the subordinate to establish the approval path rather than re-presenting.
IF you get silence past the stated window → THEN switch to a closing-the-file message that makes non-response an answer, and stop.
IF the objection is price → THEN separate whether they cannot afford it from whether they do not believe the return, and handle only the second in this cycle.
IF the buyer confirms the blocker openly → THEN stop the maneuver as successful; the blocker is now a known condition with a different play.

Branch on what the buyer does, never on what the rep hopes.

The pitfall

One named warning specific to this maneuver — the thing that ruins it. "Do not run this before the economic impact is quantified; without a number this reads as pressure rather than analysis."

Exit criteria

Both states, stated before execution:

Success — the observable outcome that means it worked, and the transition to cycle 2. Observable to a third party: a meeting booked, a name given, a written confirmation. Not "improved sentiment."
Abort — the outcome that means stop, and what replaces this cycle. Usually a bounded count or window: two attempts, or ten working days.

The abort criterion is the highest-value line in the artifact. A rep who has already invested in a play will run it a fourth time rather than conclude it failed. Naming the failure condition in advance — before anyone is invested — is what makes stopping possible later.

Worked example 1 — blocked access to the economic buyer

Situation. Enterprise deal at validation. Metrics +1, economic buyer −1, decision criteria +0.5, decision process 0, third parties 0, initiative +1, champion +0.5, competition 0. Total +2.0 against an expectation of +2.

Read. The deal sits exactly at its band expectation, which is exactly why it is dangerous — the gap test alone would leave it alone. The economic buyer is identified and the main contact has twice deflected requests to meet her. Three dimensions sit at 0 — decision process, third parties, competition — and every one of them is unknown because that same contact is the only source. The unknown-cluster override fires: the deal does not hold validation, it escalates today regardless of the comfortable total, and the default recommendation is to move it back to discovery until there is a second source inside the account.

Cycle 1 — target the economic buyer blocker.

Observe — two deflections in the context layer, both unprompted; no direct contact in eleven weeks of engagement.
Orient — reframe from asking for access to making the introduction serve the contact. Repeated asks read as going around them; the deflection is usually self-protection, not obstruction.
Decide — why the rep cares: without this they will build a case for someone who has never heard the problem stated. Pre-mortem: the contact feels bypassed and disengages — mitigated by making them the presenter rather than the gatekeeper. Go/no-go: economic buyer's identity confirmed ✓, contact responsive ✓, one-page case ready ✓, political cost low because nothing is being done behind them ✓.
Act — verbatim: "Before we go further I want to make sure what we build is what she'd actually approve — I'd rather find out now than in procurement. Could we get twenty minutes with the three of us, and you frame the business case? I'll send you the one-pager to present." IF they deflect again → THEN ask directly what the concern is; a second deflection with no stated reason is itself the answer. IF they agree but the meeting slips twice → THEN treat access as blocked and switch to a second entry point. Pitfall: do not send the one-pager to the economic buyer directly, even copied — it converts an unproven champion into an actively hostile one.
Exit — success: meeting held with the economic buyer present and speaking. Abort: two scheduling failures or a second unexplained deflection, at which point cycle 2 becomes finding an independent path in.

Cycle 2 — flank. Clear the highest-value unknown, decision process, through a second stakeholder found via the initiative rather than the contact — which also tests whether the champion's influence is real, resolving the +0.5.

Worked example 2 — the maneuver that should have been aborted

Included because this is the failure mode the structure exists to prevent, and it is the one most teams recognise.

Situation. Proposal stage, total +4 — at expectation. Third parties −1: an implementation partner has missed two consecutive working sessions and is not responding to scheduling requests. Everything else is healthy.

The gate, before anything else. Proposal permits no dimension at −1. The gate is breached the moment the partner is scored, which means cycle 1 is obliged to target third parties and the proposal should not be pursued while the −1 stands. The comfortable total is irrelevant to that. Both facts were true here, and the second one was ignored.

The play that was run. Cycle 1 correctly targeted the partner, with a straightforward escalation: a note to the partner's engagement lead restating the timeline and asking for a named owner. Reasonable, and it produced a reply promising attention.

What went wrong. Nothing visible — which is the problem. The promise was not followed by a session. The rep ran the same escalation again, higher up. Another promise, no session. A third escalation went to the client to ask them to push their partner, which cost the champion credibility internally, because they had vouched for the partner relationship.

What the structure would have caught. Two things.

The pre-mortem asks what the worst realistic outcome is. Here it was foreseeable: escalating a partner to their own client makes the champion look like they mis-managed a vendor they chose. That cost belonged in the go/no-go's fourth box — political cost against gain — and it would have failed the check on the third attempt, if not the second.

The abort criterion was never written, so nothing defined failure. With "two scheduling attempts, ten working days" stated up front, the first escalation ends after its second failure, and cycle 2 begins: not more pressure, but the incentive question — what does this partner actually gain from the integration? That is the reframe the situation needed, and it was available in week one.

The tell. A maneuver that produces agreement without movement is failing, not progressing. Promises are not exit criteria. Where the success state is written as something observable to a third party — a session held, a name given in writing — a run of polite replies cannot be mistaken for progress.