How This Account Executive Turned a Struggling Peer into a Key Player for a $10B Mastercard Deal

Mhm So The situation that comes to mind took place in last year, 2021. Um, this was earlier in the year, and at this point I was a director, um. Actually, I was kind of on the cusp between director and vice president, so. As you've had some startup experience, as I'm sure you're aware, that kind of shades, one role shades into the next, um. I was working on a deal with Mastercard, where Mastercard wanted to put together a joint solution where we together would be able to provide a Out of the box solution for our customers in Latin America to be able to issue Mastercard. Debit and prepaid cards. Now, those cards. have a lot of complex compliance, infrastructure and licensing requirements behind them. And what we were working on with MasterCard is how do we break down those barriers, make those products more accessible to our customers, and our customers were particularly important to MasterCard because the institutions we serve. Tend to in turn serve consumers and individuals who are low income and what in NGO speak is called the base of the pyramid. That's a big market for Mastercard. They've assessed that the entire Latin America and Caribbean market is worth something like $500 billion in cash transactions, but Mastercard has a strategic imperative to move on to their network. Visa, I'm sure 0 $500 billion 500 billion dollars in cash transactions, which Mastercard's fees for their entire ecosystem would be about 2% of that, so 1010 billion annually. OK. Yeah, so that's the deal that we're working on. And I was working on this deal with a woman by the name of Louisa, and Louisa was our VP for Latin America at the time, and we were working together on this deal to try and figure out, you know, the various components of it, work with Mastercard to see what their participation would look like, and all of that. Louisa, By nature of the fact that she spoke Spanish, most of the MasterCard team that we were working with was based in Latin America and was most comfortable speaking Spanish. She did a lot of the kind of point person work, account management work for that particular relationship. Now, she was experiencing a lot of frustration based off of the operations or the way that MasterCard was operating. What she was observing was that oftentimes, she would go to a meeting or be involved in an email thread or whatever, and her counterparties wouldn't be nearly as informed as she felt they ought to be, or would show up to a meeting and ask questions like, who are you guys? what is it that you're trying to do? And all of this in Louisa's mind was a sign of rudeness and a sign of these people aren't taking this relationship seriously. Now, it's a relationship that she rightly felt had to be taken seriously because it was put forward and our key contact was the vice president for Sales and marketing for the Latin America region as well. All of that led to her eventually blowing up at one of the people that she was in a meeting with. Saying she essentially told this person, if you're not gonna come to these meetings prepared, don't show up. I don't wanna talk to you. Now, she then came back to me and started bragging about how she really told this person off. From my perspective. So that's, that's all Luis's perspective and ultimately, that last thing is really what set me off and told me that something needed to be done here. Because from my perspective, what was happening, instead of Mastercard being rude, Mastercard was just being unorganized. You know, big organization. We were working across geography, so we get handed off from the Peru team to then the Uruguay team to the team in Miami. All of this bouncing around was really, in my opinion, the core cause of this. And what I was worried about, and I think rightly so, is that Louisa's negative reaction to this and her frustration to this was going to lead us To a situation where either A, we weren't going to be able to make any progress on the deal, or perhaps more likely, we would just get, The deal would just get shut down, it would get canceled. The outcome of those two things essentially is the same. The deal doesn't get done. So, That's a lot of context, and now I'll go into kind of how I went about that feedback session. Her and I got together in a Zoom room, which is not exactly the best way to talk through these issues, but it's what we have, um. And when I was delivering this feedback that, hey, this is not acceptable, we can't be dealing like this, we can't be doing business like this. I started from a place of, you know, empathy. I tried to communicate to her and make clear to her that I understood her frustrations. I understand why you feel that you're being blown off by Mastercard. I understand that this is all incredibly frustrating to you, and it's incredibly frustrating to me, but I'm not even the point person. But, and this is, this is where the feedback then comes in. What I think you need to consider, Louisa, now I'm speaking as though I were speaking to her, is that they are perhaps just unorganized. It is not them being rude to you, and that in fact, your reactions to these frustrations by taking it out on your counterparties is going to significantly endanger this particular relationship, and it's not going to be an effective way to move forward. And of course, I offered to help her blow off steam, to help her deal with counterparties, however, she felt it was going to be useful to not have these sorts of issues come to a head in the future. Now, to her credit, she accepted that feedback really, really well. I think perhaps in the back of her mind she knew that that was not the right approach, and she felt as though she had gone too far. I think when she was coming to me bragging about how she had told this person off, she perhaps was looking for a little bit of validation that and and was unsure about her actions. Once I gave her the feedback, she accepted it very, very well, said, yes, I appreciate that, I think you're right, and we were able to move forward. Still had frustrations, but we were able to deal with them internally. Ultimately, over the next few months, we were able to close that deal, and we got to a position where the terms that were given to us by Mastercard, Were particularly enticing and exciting. I can't, I'm fairly confident that it's proprietary information to give you numbers, but the structure of that deal was that they were going to give us a sizable sign-on bonus, which would have covered all of our investments into that project, into that region, um. As the first step of our engagements, and then additionally, moving forward, they were going to provide us with marketing budget for each institution that we closed. And essentially the way that that was going to work is that was going to be a bounty system. So we would close a customer and they would give us some chunk of marketing budget, um, in order to close that deal. Additionally, In terms of the deal structure itself, they waived a bunch of fees that would have impacted us, and would have impacted our customers, had we not had this special relationship, this special deal with Mastercard. So I'll pause there, um, for any questions you might have. Well,

In terms of my relationship to this person or in terms of the impact that this was having,

I certainly wouldn't say it. And, and I think that this is mostly my communication style. I don't know that I would ever Certainly not with a peer. I don't know that I would ever take the stance of this is all the revenue you're gonna cost us, this is all of, you're gonna get fired from this. It was certainly more on the, hey, don't do that perspective, but I think what is important about that is Oh, I think that that actually is an important component of the way that I give feedback to peers or even to other members of the team is that giving pointed feedback like that, at least in my experience in my organization, is not something that necessarily gets the best results. Um, And so regardless of the context, starting from a position of I understand where you're coming from. Don't do that, gets you better results than pointed feedback like you're gonna get fired, just in my experience, perhaps your experience is different.

Ah, apologies then.

I,

It was, it was that session where she came back to us or came back to me and started bragging about how she had blown up at this particular person. The frustrations I knew had been going on for a while, but it really came to a head when she essentially told off and this person was the country manager for Peru. She said, don't come to meetings with me that aren't where you're not prepared, where you act like you don't care about this deal. That particular interaction that she told me about was the big red flag.