After four decades of asking sales leaders the same question — who are you? — I rarely hear an answer that reframes the entire industry’s thinking in one sitting. Lee Levitt did exactly that at our Revenue Acceleration Summit, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Here’s the number that should keep every sales leader up at night: 40 to 60% of enterprise deals end in no decision. Not lost to a competitor. Not killed by price. Just frozen. And Lee’s research over thirty years of sales leadership and coaching points to something most of us got backwards from the start. We assume buyers freeze because moving forward feels risky. Lee’s insight is the opposite: buyers freeze because standing still feels safe.

That single reframe changes everything about how you diagnose a stalled deal.

Lee told a story about a rep named Rod, selling a $200K automation software upgrade to a hospital. The customer was engaged, asking good questions, right up until the facilities director said they’d pass. Old software going end-of-life, no urgency felt. Lee asked Rod one question: what does the software control? Building systems. HVAC. Elevators. What happens if it goes down? The systems go down — including the elevators. Rod went quiet, then said it plainly: patients could get stuck. Patients could die.

Lee told him to take that feeling — not as pressure, but as passion — back to the customer. Not to tell them what was at stake, but to help them see it themselves. The deal closed the next day.

That’s the whole game. Buyers don’t move because you pushed harder. They move because they discovered, on their own, what standing still was costing them.

Lee’s framework names five reasons deals freeze: safety, trust, uncertainty, complexity, and knowledge gaps. Every stalled deal in your pipeline is stuck on one of these. The shift in thinking is profound — it’s not the deal that’s frozen. It’s a human being, frozen for a specific, identifiable reason.

What surprised Lee most in years of applying this lens? The buyers asking the most questions are often the ones most stuck — using engagement to mask the fear of making the wrong call. As Rob Peterson put it in a real-time text during our session, echoing the JOLT research: “it’s no longer fear of missing out, it’s fear of messing up.”

Here’s what I love most about Lee’s prescription: it costs nothing. At your next deal review, ask your reps one question. Not “what’s the next step?” Instead: what did the buyer say? Help your rep discover where that buyer is stuck, the same way Rod discovered it himself.

If just 10% of your frozen deals come unstuck, Lee estimates a 16 to 20% revenue uplift — with no new spend, no new technology, no new headcount.

Sometimes the biggest unlock in sales isn’t a new system. It’s a better question.

Learn more about Lee’s “Stuck Guide” at TogetherWeWin.team/summit.

Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and CEO of Selling Power. He has interviewed Marc Benioff and hundreds of the world’s top sales leaders and authors over a career spanning more than four decades. Reach him at gg@sellingpower.com.