Driving vs. Reacting: Execs Don't Want More Info, They Want Faster Results

John Coker, 2Win's VP of GTM Advisory, played basketball at a college level for years before he ever stepped onto an NBA court. He could read a defense, call the right play in a broken possession, and control the tempo on the floor. When he made the jump to the NBA, something happened that he hadn't expected. The game started happening to him instead of him driving the game.

The rules hadn't changed. The court was the same ninety-four feet it had always been. But the players around him moved faster and made decisions faster. By the time Coker reacted to what was happening, he was already three steps behind.

College and NBA basketball run on the same fundamentals, the same footwork, and the same defensive reads. He hadn't forgotten how to play basketball, but at this level, the shot clock is shorter, the defenders are faster and taller, and the window to make the right move shrinks from a second to a blink. Getting them to hold up at that speed took real work: not a completely new skill set, just sharper reads, faster decisions, and the kind of recalibration that comes from facing a pace he'd never had to match before.

Swap the court for a boardroom and plenty of revenue professionals, like you, can relate to that feeling. The meeting where a VP or member of the C-suite sits down across the table, and the way you approach it changes, even though the agenda hasn't. Same fundamentals, faster approach. Like the shot clock, you planned for thirty minutes; now you get fifteen. The content didn't shrink; the time did, and executives don't wait for you to build up to the point.

Executive engagement isn't a different game. It's the same fundamentals played at a higher level. What changes is whether you've had enough practice to anticipate the conversation instead of reacting to it. It's the same shift John Coker made moving from college basketball to the NBA.

The Insight Winning with Executives Was Built On

Professionals often find that executive meetings happen faster than they prepared for. They spend prep time building slides, crafting talking points, and rehearsing answers to questions that never come up. Then they open the meeting by thanking the executive for their time and recapping what the sponsor already told them. That looks and feels like preparation, but it's preparing you to react instead of lead.

Executive engagements use the same fundamentals as any conversation: reading what's going on, handling objections instead of dodging them, and building a case for why something should change. What's different at the executive level is whether you've built on the skills you already have enough to see what's coming before it happens instead of catching up to it.

The mindset shift is to walk into every executive conversation anticipating that there's a different level of play required for this engagement.

Coker described his early games in the NBA this way:

"I felt less in control of the pace, and I felt like I was playing reactionary instead of driving the game."

Most professionals already have the talent and the skill set. What's missing is knowing how to play at the executive's level and speed, and trusting themselves enough to own it. The same thing shows up the moment a VP shifts topics mid-sentence or says they need to leave ten minutes early.

The executive is carrying a view of the business the rest of the room doesn't have, running from meeting to meeting on a schedule that rewards whoever gets to the point fastest. What will actually earn their attention is results and insight, not more information stacked onto what they already know. The fix was never a new toolkit, just the perspective to use the skills you already have in a different way.

Why It Feels Like the Game Sped Up 

Coker eventually found his footing on the NBA floor. By his own account, the game never actually got slower. He'd just caught up enough that it started to feel that way.

"The game's happening at the same speed, but in real time it just feels like it slows down. I can start to anticipate what's going to happen next."

Anticipation is a buildable skill, not some innate edge reserved for people who read a room faster than everyone else in it. It just takes using the skills you already have with more confidence, applied a little differently. In an executive conversation, it means knowing enough about what the exec cares about that their next move stops being a surprise.

Every executive has a different goal driving them, usually tied to whatever strategic initiative they're on the hook for that quarter. When they switch gears mid-conversation, it's rarely a test. It's more a check on whether the conversation in front of them is actually going to move something they care about.

Executives operate at the pace they do because they're weighing a wider view of the business. They want impacts, and they want to know how you're going to help them get there. Without that connection, even a technically solid conversation can leave them unconvinced you understand what they're actually accountable for.

The Belief Behind the Executive Summary

An Executive Summary is your own point of view on where a specific executive stands, formed before you ever walk into the room with them, not as a script to recite, but as a way to prepare for wherever you want to take the room. Building one forces you to work out where that executive stands before you walk into the room, so you already have a plan for whatever comes up instead of reacting to it live. Instead of letting the executive take the conversation wherever they want, you take it back.

Understanding where someone stands well enough lets you open the conversation on your own terms instead of waiting to see which direction the room takes. That's the whole difference between driving and reacting, decided before anyone's even sat down at the table. Walk in without that groundwork, and the feeling that often follows you out the door is a sense that the executive decided about you in the first two minutes and everything after was just politeness. It was an unprepared read on where they stood, not a bad meeting.

Preparing for a meeting with an executive won't make a hard conversation easy, but it does make the conversation easier for you to lead. You still might get a question you didn't see coming. You're just not answering it from a standing start. Coker built his agility through thousands of live possessions, reading a defense in real time.

Your agility comes from the work you put in before the meeting starts: research, conversations with your sponsor, an honest look at what this specific executive actually cares about. Different practice, same instinct. Either way, the shift from reacting to driving happens in preparation, long before it happens in the room.

From Reacting to Driving

None of this is about tenure or title. Plenty of people with fifteen years of experience still walk into executive meetings without the skills they need to lead the room, and plenty of newer professionals already know how to drive one. People assume executive presence is something you're born with, but it comes from being confident enough in your own insight to hold your ground. The difference shows up as:

• Leading with the impact that matters to that specific executive, not a recap of what a sponsor already told them
• Setting the agenda instead of waiting for someone else to hand you one
• Showing up with a real point of view instead of borrowing someone else's that you can't actually defend

Driving the conversation starts with you telling the executive exactly why this meeting matters within the first few minutes. Don't risk them spending the next twenty minutes deciding for themselves whether it was worth their time. That's a different thing entirely from controlling the room or talking over the executive, and the professionals who confuse the two are usually the ones executives stop making time for.

Access to the C-suite is expensive to earn. A meeting that ends in nothing but a vague promise to follow up makes the next invitation harder to get. Reacting well enough to survive a meeting isn't as effective as driving one well enough to earn the next.

Anyone can walk into that room with enough confidence in their own point of view and enough agility to let the conversation go where it needs to, while still knowing when to pull it back toward what they came to accomplish.

That's the shift Coker made: from reacting three steps behind, to reading the play fast enough to be ahead of it. The same shift is available to anyone willing to put the work in before the meeting starts instead of during it, one executive conversation at a time.

One more resource if you want it: The Managing Up Mindset Shift is a short set of reflection questions for working with executives, covering how to read their pace, their priorities, and your own assumptions about both.