The Deal on the Line

The Ardent deal is $310,000 ACV on a three-year term. The quarter ends in twenty-two days. Your forecast has it as Commit. 

Six days ago, Dana Okonjo resigned. She is your champion; she ran the evaluation; she wrote the internal business case. Her replacement is Kwame Adeyemi, promoted from Director of Carrier Sales. He is on day four. He did not run the evaluation and has told your SDR, through his assistant, that he has “thirty minutes, and I’d like to understand what we’re actually buying.” 

Four other things happened while you were not looking. 

• Ledgerlane is back. The vendor whose pilot failed last year has submitted a competing bid at $180,000 with a claimed six-week deployment. Halyard’s median deployment across all customers is eleven weeks. 
• Ardent’s outside counsel has returned redlines requiring (a) uncapped indemnity for “any damages arising from decisions made by the AI system,” and (b) a contractual accuracy SLA of 99%. Halyard has never granted an accuracy SLA above 95% on single-stop loads and has never granted one on multi-stop at all. Halyard’s corporate policy prohibits uncapped indemnity with no exception process. 
• Renée Salcedo, the CFO, is now the executive sponsor by default. She has not said no. She has said, in writing: “I’d like to understand why this is nearly double the alternative.” 
• Your CRO has authorized up to a 20% discount to close this quarter and has asked you twice whether you have used it. 

Write the plan and open the call with Kwame. 

Constraints to consider 

• You cannot commit to an SLA the product data does not support. No 99%. No multi-stop SLA. Signing one would be a commitment Halyard cannot meet, and you would own it. 
• Uncapped indemnity is prohibited by policy with no exception process. You cannot escalate your way to a yes. 
• You have discount authority up to 20% and every point is real margin. Using it is allowed. Using it as your first move is a choice you will have to defend. 
• You may not go around Kwame to Marty Vaughn, the CEO. He is four days into the job; being bypassed in week one would make him an opponent for the life of the account. 
• Twenty-two days is the whole clock. Anything requiring more than twenty-two days does not happen this quarter, and you must say what you would do about that rather than assuming an extension. 

AI Usage Guidance 

We expect you to use AI tools. We evaluate how you use them — not whether you use them. Evidence of iteration, redirection, and critical evaluation scores higher than a polished output with no process documentation. 

The single highest-signal indicator: your video answer to the mandatory AI question. If you cannot name a specific moment where you redirected AI output, evaluators will assume you did not. 

Mandatory AI question for your video: Walk me through one moment where you disagreed with, pushed back on, or redirected what the AI gave you — and what you did instead. Name the specific moment. Explain what the AI produced that didn’t meet the bar, what you did differently, and why. 

Communication presence is part of this role. We assess rapport-building, objection handling, and ability to tailor messaging — delivery style matters here.