Friday night. I told myself I’d write the third story and see if the pattern held. If it didn’t, I could stop pretending I’d found something. If it did, I’d have to figure out what to do with it.
It held.
Healthcare client, 2022. Regional health system, about fifteen hospitals, enterprise contract in year two of three. Classified as “green” in every tracking system we had. Usage steady, sponsors responsive, NPS in the high 70s. By every metric that mattered to my manager, a healthy account.
I was at an industry conference. Not presenting. Attending. At a dinner with eight people from five organizations, the woman next to me mentioned, between the salad and the entree, that their new CMO was consolidating all technology decisions under a single committee. Everything above $200K needed committee approval.
Our contract was $840K annual.
I took the napkin from under my water glass and started drawing. A map of the decision-maker network as I understood it, which was different from how our CRM understood it. Lines between names. Question marks next to three people I hadn’t talked to. The CMO circled, a person who didn’t know our product existed and who now controlled whether we kept the contract.
The VP watched me draw and said, “you’re the only vendor who’s ever asked me about the committee.”
That stayed with me. Not because it was flattering. Because it meant every other vendor was seeing green on the same dashboard and none of them were at this dinner, listening, drawing on a napkin.
I spent three months building a relationship with that committee. Not selling. Listening. By the time the renewal came up, I was presenting in their language, addressing their criteria. The account renewed. Full term, no discount.
I wrote that in about fifteen minutes. Faster than the second, which was faster than the first. The shape is the same. Not similar. The same.
In all three stories, the data said fine. In all three, a person changed or a structure shifted, and the metrics hadn’t caught up. In all three, I noticed because I was reading people, not dashboards.
Three stories. Same pattern.
I should feel triumphant. Validated, maybe. I feel closer to exposed. Because if the pattern held all three times, this isn’t something I started doing recently. It’s something I’ve been doing for years, quietly, without naming it, without charging for it, without recognizing it as a skill.
Twenty-four years. Not once did I walk into a meeting and say, “the thing I do is read the human signals the data misses.” I just did it. When it worked, my manager called it intuitive or, once, “Leigh being Leigh.” I took that as a compliment. I think now it was a way of making what I do sound like a personality trait instead of an expertise.
There’s a difference between those two things. A big one. Personality traits are free. Expertise gets invoiced.
I almost called this a revelation and then stopped myself. It’s something I could have seen at any point in the last decade if I’d been paying attention to myself the way I pay attention to clients. The fact that I’m seeing it now, at 49, with “meets expectations” still in my teeth, I don’t want to be too dramatic about it. I also don’t want to not be dramatic enough.
Doug and I had dinner tonight. Friday, so takeout Thai from the place on Washington. Over pad see ew he told me about a policy renewal that went sideways. A client who ghosted, a broker who didn’t follow up, a deal that almost lapsed because nobody noticed the silence.
I listened and thought: you are describing the exact thing I save. From the other side.
I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything about the case studies or the pattern or any of it. But I looked at him across the table and thought: we are both people who notice when someone goes quiet. We just do it in different buildings, for different paychecks, and one of us is thinking about doing it alone.
Three stories now. The pattern is confirmed, at least to me. I can tell you what I do and show you exactly how I did it, three times, with real numbers.
What I still can’t do is name it. Not in a way that fits on a website or a business card. “She reads people” is an observation, not a service offering. And I’m starting to suspect that the distance between those two things is where most people like me get stuck and quietly go back to their desks.
Fifteen minutes to write the third story. Twenty-four years to notice what it meant. I’m still working on the ratio.