Keep one draft in your hands and ask each person who can block the deal only what they would change. The one experiment warns that whoever writes the first draft shapes the ending.
Legal has a version, IT has a version, and the champion has a third. Every round of edits moves the deal further apart.
Keep one draft, and keep it in your hands. Take it to each person who can block the deal and ask one question: what would you change? You are collecting criticism, not agreement. Rewrite the draft, go round again, and ask nobody to commit until the objections have been written out of the text.
The move comes from mediation and diplomacy, where it is called the single negotiating text. Roger Fisher and William Ury put it into Getting to Yes, with the Camp David talks as their example.
The procedure, as Beyond Intractability sets it out. M. Shane Smith's 2005 entry gives the steps. A third party drafts a document from the parties' interests, not their stated positions, and nobody is committed to it. The third party takes the draft to each party in turn to collect criticisms, not concessions, folds the comments in, and goes round again. The end product is a document with the major objections taken out.
Camp David, 5 to 17 September 1978. The US State Department's historian records that American experts produced a draft text that served as the basis for the talks and was revised many times. When three-way meetings broke down, Carter and Vance met the Egyptian and Israeli delegations separately for the remaining twelve days. The summit ended with two framework documents rather than a treaty.
The Law of the Sea conference. Tullio Treves, writing for the UN's legal library, describes how, from 1975, the chairs of the main committees each drafted part of the future convention on their own responsibility. The drafts were refined version by version and merged from 1977, giving the conference one basic draft that became the only thing delegates could propose amendments to.
How the edits are marked in the EU Council. Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Alena Drieschova's study of track-change diplomacy records the conventions inside the one shared text. New text is bold and underlined, deleted text is struck through, and square brackets mark what is not yet agreed. Footnotes carry each delegation's proposed changes and reservations.
Nothing in sales publishes the loop. The nearest sales artefact is a shared document, not a draft circulated for criticism. Dock's business case template has five sections, an executive summary, challenges and solutions, key metrics, additional requirements and key stakeholders, and is shared with the decision makers as one workspace. Dock sells the deal-room software it runs in. No sales source publishes the question you put to each stakeholder, or the rule of asking for criticism instead of a yes.
Nobody has measured it. No study compares sellers who took one draft round a buying group with sellers who worked the same group in separate conversations. The nearest practitioner version is the shared business case, such as Fluint's one-page business case, which Nate Nasralla frames as the way a rep controls the message when they are not in the room. Fluint sells the software that produces it.
What has been measured is the problem. Brent Adamson of Gartner writes in Sensemaking for Sales that B2B customers spend only 17% of their buying process talking to potential suppliers, which is why a document has to do the work you cannot be there to do. Karl Schmidt, Brent Adamson and Anna Bird of CEB report in Making the Consensus Sale that the authority to buy now sits with groups whose members can each block the deal.
The one experiment is a warning. Pekka Korhonen, Nicholas Oretskin, Jeffrey Teich and Jyrki Wallenius ran two experiments, in Helsinki and in New Mexico, on two-party mediation using a single text as Howard Raiffa defines it, published in Group Decision and Negotiation in 1995. They built a slant into the opening draft and had the mediator do nothing but pass information between the parties. The slant moved the final outcome, unless later steps corrected for it.
Diplomacy, documented but never compared. Adler-Nissen and Drieschova's study, in International Studies Quarterly in 2019, rests on two and a half months of observation inside the EU Council in 2014, 266 internal documents and interviews with ambassadors and officials. It records in detail how a large group edits one text. It compares that with no other way of running the talks, and neither Camp David nor the Law of the Sea has a comparison either.
The only experiment used two-party mediation with a deliberately passive mediator, not a seller holding the pen on their own deal, and its finding is a caution. Nothing has compared a buying group worked through one text with the same group worked through separate conversations.
Write one draft, take it to each person who can block the deal, and ask only what they would change. Rewrite, go round again, and keep a single version instead of letting copies multiply. The one experiment says the opening draft shapes the ending, so whoever writes the first version is choosing the answer. In a deal that is you, so spend the time on the first draft.