I won't give too many details as negotiations have only just closed, but we are product development engineers building a physical hardware/software system and s

I won't give too many details as negotiations have only just closed, but we are product development engineers building a physical hardware/software system and selling to operators to whom product development is a completely foreign concept. We knew who our target customers were, and made contact with one who came to us at a trade-show. This went through a few rounds of talks, but although the initial contact and his manager were dead keen, the decision maker stalled and we gave up. Simultaneously, we found a contact in our network who got us to near the top of the hierarchy of a second much bigger customer. They sent a single manager to have a demo, and we must have blown him away because they brought the CEO, CFO, some VPs and even a board member around for the same demo a few days later. They proposed a partnership that day and left us to iron out the details. Direct access to the decision makers was a HUGE part of making this happen. It took about four weeks of meetings and emails to get alignment, but we're now preparing for a paid trial with an MOU for a much longer partnership assuming all goes well. The biggest challenge was withholding their desired exclusivity in different ways until we reached alignment on the upside to us, at which point we gave them the lockouts and distribution rights they wanted. Fortunately this deal went well for us, but had it not we'd be talking about how much time we wasted preparing models and spreadsheets and refining terms of agreement. We had other paths we could have gone down, and the interest from this customer was validation that the product was valuable so we weren't short of options. I think that gave us good negotiating leverage, and we were ready to walk away at one point. The biggest irritation was probably the translation from verbal discussions to written form, as it seemed like terms we'd talked through and removed were being re-added in different flavours each round. Careless (or perhaps deliberate...) wording could have cost us half our upside, but we spotted that and resolved it. I don't believe any other companies were in the mix. I suspect they saw that our product was a distinct improvement over their existing capability on so many counts that they just jumped at the prospect of getting it exclusively before their competitors did.