3 Questions to Ask About Box 8 — Emotional Favourite
1. You have documented at least 3 shared Aspirations, Values, or Interests (AVI) with each active prospect
What does "AVI — Aspirations, Values, Interests" mean?
A framework for building genuine propinquity — the sense of closeness — with prospects, based on three kinds of shared ground: Aspirations (where they want to go), Values (what they believe), and Interests (what they do outside work).
74% of customers choose the person who brought value first, and shared ground is what makes that value land as care rather than tactics. The word that matters is genuine: manufactured common ground is transparent and does more damage than no attempt at all.
Real overlap, referenced naturally, is what makes a founder memorable when the trigger fires.
1. Before each touchpoint, spend five minutes on the prospect's LinkedIn, recent posts, or company news.
2. Find one real point of overlap in Aspirations, Values, or Interests.
3. Reference it in a way that asks for nothing — a relevant article, a congratulation, an introduction.
4. Log it in your CRM so you can see the pattern across prospects.
5. Aim for three documented AVI touchpoints per active prospect per month. If you cannot find genuine overlap with a prospect, that is useful information about fit.
Example: A prospect coaches youth soccer at weekends. The founder played growing up. He sends an article about a coaching methodology he found interesting — no product mention, no ask, thirty seconds of effort. Six weeks later, when the prospect's trigger fired, the founder was the first call. The competing vendor had sent four proposal follow-ups in the same period.
2. At each active account, you know the person your main contact reports to, the person most likely to replace them, and someone in a different department who benefits from your solution
What does "Multi-Threading the Account" mean?
Three specific relationships to build at every active account: the person your main contact reports to, the person most likely to replace them if they leave, and someone in a different department who benefits from your solution.
Deals built on a single relationship die the moment that person leaves, gets reassigned, or stops responding — and in B2B, that happens more often than founders expect.
Multi-threading means the deal survives any one person's departure, and it also surfaces objections and buying signals a single contact would never share.
1. Ask your main contact directly: "Who else here would find this useful?" and "Who do you report to?"
2. Request a warm introduction to at least one of these three people per active account.
3. Have at least one genuine conversation with each — not a cc on an email.
4. Track it: for each active account, can you name the reporting-line contact, the likely successor, and the cross-department beneficiary? If any are blank, that account is single-threaded and at risk.
5. Prioritize multi-threading the accounts where the deal size or timeline makes a single point of failure especially costly.
Example: A founder's main champion at a 40-person company was laid off two weeks before signing. Because she'd also built a relationship with the champion's manager and someone on the ops team who'd be using the tool daily, the deal survived the departure and closed on schedule — the manager picked up where the champion left off.
3. In your last five prospects, at least 3 have told you — unprompted — that they want to work with you specifically, not just because of what you're selling
What does "Emotional Favourite" mean?
Proof that a prospect has already made their decision: they know you, like you, trust you, and want to see you succeed — and they have told you, unprompted, that they want to work with you specifically, not just because of what you're selling.
Not a prediction about what they would do — evidence of what they already decided.
The first decision a buyer makes isn't what to buy — it's who to buy from. Everything after that, the feature comparisons, the pricing, the RFP, is the buyer collecting logical reasons to justify a choice they already made emotionally.
74% of customers choose the person who brought value first, and 37% choose whoever is simply easiest to deal with. Being the Emotional Favourite means you've already won the decision that actually matters — the rest of the sales process is theater for a choice that's already been made.
Arriving after someone else has earned that position means competing on price, which is the worst position an early founder can occupy.
1. Build genuine common ground with every active prospect — see AVI.
2. Build relationships beyond your single point of contact at each account — see Multi-Threading.
3. Send one genuinely useful non-sales item every 30 days — an article, an introduction, a piece of data.
4. Respond faster than anyone else they deal with. Speed is the cheapest differentiator available to a founder.
5. Track it across your last five prospects: how many have told you, unprompted, that they want to work with you — not just your solution? If you don't know the answer, you're not tracking whether you're actually becoming their Emotional Favourite.
Example: A founder replied to a prospect's 9pm email within the hour while their incumbent vendor took three days. No pitch, just a useful answer. Eleven weeks later the prospect's operations lead resigned — a Category C trigger — and the founder got the first call. The incumbent was never contacted. When asked why, the prospect said: "Honestly, I just like working with you more."