The Deals Your Reps Feel Good About Are the Ones at Risk

Forty to sixty percent of B2B deals end in no decision. Dixon and McKenna found that through research covering more than two million sales conversations, published in The JOLT Effect.

The number isn’t the surprising part. Where it hides is.

Those deals aren’t lost to a competitor. They’re lost to a buyer who decides standing still is safer than moving, but stays engaged anyway. Takes the calls. Asks good questions. Nods along. Your rep leaves that meeting feeling good and tells you the deal is fine.

The buyers I worry about most are the responsive ones.

That’s the revenue leak, and it comes from the deals nobody’s worried about.

Selling and buying aren’t two activities happening across a table from each other. They’re one closed system. What your rep does changes what the buyer does, and what the buyer does changes what your rep reports back to you.

Which is why typical quarter-end reactions backfire. Discounting burns margin and the deal still doesn’t move. Piling on more information confuses a buyer further when they’re already drowning in it. Escalating to executive presence can feel like pressure to the buyer, and in a closed system pressure comes back as resistance. A frozen buyer freezes harder. I’ve done all three…and more.

None of the three touch the reason the buyer is frozen. There are five: safety, trust, uncertainty, complexity, and a champion who can’t carry the argument into the room where the decision gets made.

It isn’t the deal that’s frozen. It’s a person. And in a buying committee it’s usually several, each stuck for a different reason.

Which brings it down to one question, and you don’t ask it of the buyer. You ask it of your rep.

At your next deal review, on every deal that matters: what did the buyer say?

Not what’s the next step. Not when does it close. We inspect stage. We inspect activity. We almost never inspect the words, and the words are the only place the reason shows up. It’s also the only question that forces your rep to tell you which buyer, which is the first thing you need to know when four people on a buying team are frozen for four different reasons.

A rep I coached had a $200,000 hospital deal go quiet on exactly this. The buyer said everything was fine. So I asked what the software actually controlled. Building systems. HVAC. Lighting. Elevators. The buyer saw, for the first time, what standing still would cost him. Stalled elevators put patients at risk. The deal closed the next day.

Once the rep tells you what the buyer actually said one of two things becomes clear. Either there’s a cost to standing still the buyer hasn’t seen yet, and now you know the move. Or there isn’t, and that deal comes out of the forecast now, while there’s still time to find pipeline that’s real. Forward, or out.

Underneath the question sits a belief. The purpose of selling is not selling. It’s helping the buyer achieve their strategic business results. Do that and the buyer moves, because moving has become obviously better than standing still. The revenue follows.

Ask the question Monday. You’ll know by the afternoon whether it works. The frameworks for reading a frozen buyer are at togetherwewin.team/masterclass, and the system underneath all of it is in my new book, Together We Win, out now: amazon.com/dp/B0HJ387L2N.

Lee Levitt is Principal of the Acelera Group, where he advises sales leaders at emerging technology and services companies. Over thirty years he has led sales teams, built enablement functions, and coached reps and the executives who lead them, including senior roles at Oracle, Google, Phase Forward, and BAO and years as an industry analyst at IDC. He is the author of Together We Win and The Second Meeting, and lives on Cape Cod. acelera.group