Week Six, No ICP, and a Champion on Leave
Verdant Analytics is a 40-person B2B SaaS company, $6M ARR, selling operations analytics to manufacturers. Six weeks ago they signed a fixed-fee $34,000, eight-week onboarding with your agency: portal audit, lifecycle and lead scoring build, three core workflows, two dashboards, and a sales-enablement session. Fifty percent was invoiced at sign-off, fifty at completion.
Week six status: the kickoff happened, but the VP of Sales attended twenty minutes of it and nobody from sales has joined a call since. No ICP document exists; the marketing manager sends a 2019 persona deck when asked. The CRM holds 22,000 contacts, 31% missing country, and there are four written definitions of MQL across three Slack threads. Your champion, the marketing manager, has just gone on parental leave. Her replacement, the COO, opens this week's call with: "While we're here, we want to add an ABM program and a twelve-email nurture sequence, and still finish on the original date."
1. Triage the remaining two weeks. What do you cut, keep, and reschedule, and what exactly do you ask the COO to decide on that call?
Read the worked answer
The project is not failing on delivery. It is failing on three client-side prerequisites - no ICP, no sales participation, and no single owner now that the champion is away. Building faster makes that worse, because you would be manufacturing artifacts nobody has agreed to own.
Cut. The sales-enablement session: with no sales audience, it produces a recording and nothing else. The third workflow and the second dashboard.
Keep. The portal audit (already largely done and it is the evidence base), lifecycle and lead scoring, and one dashboard. The lifecycle build is only possible if the MQL definition gets decided, so that becomes the centrepiece of the call rather than a document request.
Reschedule. The second dashboard and the enablement session move to a Phase 2 with the ABM conversation.
What to ask the COO to decide, in the call, with a deadline. (1) Who owns the MQL definition - name the person, and get a 90-minute workshop booked this week with that person plus one working rep. (2) Confirm in writing that the 2019 persona deck is not the ICP and that no ICP means the ABM request has no input. (3) Confirm the re-baselined completion date. Three decisions, one meeting, recorded in a follow-up email within the hour.
Say plainly that the original date is still achievable if the MQL workshop happens; if it does not, the date moves, not the quality bar.
2. Respond to the ABM and twelve-email nurture request. What do you agree to, what do you decline, and in what form?
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Separate the need from the ask. The COO is not being unreasonable - she has inherited a stalled project and is trying to salvage value from it. The mistake would be absorbing new scope to look accommodating, because that converts a schedule problem into a profitability problem and teaches her that requests are free.
Estimate before responding. A twelve-email nurture with segmentation and a testing plan is roughly 20–25 hours; a real ABM pilot (target account list, tiering, personalised sequences, reporting) is 30–40 hours and depends on an ICP that does not exist. Neither fits in two weeks alongside the existing build.
Agree to, within fee. A four-email welcome sequence built on the lifecycle stages already under construction, plus the ABM discovery conversation inside the existing strategy call. This is bounded, it reinforces work already paid for, and it demonstrates good faith.
Decline, in writing. The full ABM program and the full twelve-email sequence, as additions to a fixed fee and a fixed date.
Form. A one-page change order listing scope, hours, cost, and the explicit trade-off: original date plus three weeks, or original date with something removed from current scope. Give the COO the choice rather than the refusal. Route ABM into a Phase 2 proposal with a budget owner named. Document it in the project log the same day, because an undocumented scope conversation is the one that gets remembered differently in month four.
3. Draft the exit criteria you will hold the second milestone against, and explain how you protect that invoice if the client's dependencies stay unmet.
Read the worked answer
Completion must be defined by acceptance, not by delivery, or "done" becomes whatever the client feels on the day the invoice arrives.
Exit criteria, written at kickoff and restated now. Lifecycle stages live and documented; MQL definition signed off by a named executive; the agreed workflows active and proven with five test contacts; one dashboard reviewed in a live session with the COO; a recorded handover so the portal is not dependent on a departed champion. Each with an acceptance test and a client-side owner.
Protecting the invoice. Two mechanisms. First, the assumptions clause: the fixed fee and date assume client delivery of the ICP, a sales representative on two calls, and a decision-maker for the MQL definition by an agreed date. Where those slip, the timeline moves day-for-day, logged in the project record. Second, never withhold completed work as leverage - issue the full completion pack, the documentation, and a short, factual open-items list stating what remains blocked and on whom. Withholding invites a dispute; a documented dependency list wins one.
If the COO disputes completion, offer a paid extension or a reduced-scope close rather than an unpaid sprint - and be willing to take a small haircut on the final invoice to preserve a reference client. Then fix the sales process: add an ICP and data-health prerequisite checklist to every onboarding, because this deal was sold with a delivery risk that should have been priced.