Making the Deal with Strut Consulting's Candice Rezvanian

Axios spoke to Rezvanian for our recurring feature on how to finesse a major deal.

• When the stakes are high, how do you bring two sides together? Her advice:

📝 Develop a process and stick to it. Document every opportunity — successful or not — to see how you can improve your deal-making skills.

• If you're an investor, that means developing and sticking to a best-in-class deal flow management and due diligence process that follows industry standard best practices.

🔎 Create transparency. Rather than keeping your process under wraps, share it with those in your pipeline, at least at a high level.

• It establishes clear expectations and quickens the pace because the other party knows what to anticipate, prepare, and provide to ease the decision-making process.

😊 Keep it kind. Even if the deal falls through, the other party should have a positive, professional experience that leads to them coming back or sending you future deals.

• Habits to incorporate into your process include responding to emails promptly, being punctual, sending thank you notes, providing regular status updates, and getting to an answer faster — especially if it's no — so the other parties don't feel their time was wasted.

Go deeper: Rezvanian shares venture capital deal-making missteps to avoid.