The deals that die of nothing

For the last two or three years, a growing share of the briefs that reach me have described a symptom with real precision. Pipeline is stalling in late stage. The team is not converting the meetings it earns. Deals go quiet after a strong demo. The diagnosis in the brief is usually accurate, carefully observed, and genuinely the thing the business can see. That is not a criticism of anyone who writes those briefs. It is the ordinary condition of working inside a business: you can see what is happening to you far more clearly than you can see what is producing it.

What interests me is what happens next. Because the numbers underneath these briefs are not subtle, and they have been circulating for years.

Between 40 and 60% of losses in complex B2B are not losses to a competitor. They are losses to nothing at all. Not a no, just no decision. Dixon and McKenna put that figure in The JOLT Effect. Gartner's buyer research supplies the other half: 77% of B2B buyers describe their most recent purchase as complex or difficult. Sales cycles are increasing by 25% in the last 5 years.

Those are crisis numbers, and we quote them constantly. They open conference talks. They appear on slide two of proposals, mine included. We have collectively agreed that this is happening. What we have not done is act as though it is.

Here is what I think is going on, and I would rather you argued with it than agreed politely. We are comfortable with symptoms because symptoms have owners. A conversion problem belongs to sales. A pipeline problem belongs to marketing. A retention problem belongs to customer success. Each one can be assigned, funded, measured and reported on. The root cause underneath most of them has no owner at all, and the moment someone names it out loud, the room goes quiet and then moves back to the symptom. I have watched that happen. I have been the one who moved the conversation back, because the symptom was the part I knew how to help with that week.

The buyer is not indecisive. The buyer is being asked to reconcile four different versions of us. They experience one business. We behave like several.

That sentence is easy to agree with and very hard to act on, which is precisely why it gets nodded at and left alone. Nobody's objectives contain it. No function is measured on it. It sits in the space between teams, and the space between teams is nobody's project.

Three of the causes are about them. The fourth is about us.

When you strip the reported reasons back, most no-decision losses trace to one of four things, and none of them are about the buyer's character.

Three are about confidence. They cannot tell which option is genuinely best. They are afraid they have not done enough homework and will be found out for it. Or they cannot picture what happens in the six months after signature, which makes waiting feel like the safe choice rather than the expensive one.

The fourth is ours. Our champion has to run a conversation we are not in, in a room we will never enter, and we have only ever given them material designed to convince them. Nothing designed to help them convince anyone else. We equipped them to be sold to. We did not equip them to sell.

I have done this. I have handed someone a beautiful deck that answered every question they had already stopped asking, and none of the questions their finance director was about to ask. The symptom I reported afterwards was that the deal went quiet.

What the team reports, and what is usually underneath it

The left column is what goes into the CRM, and it is almost always true. The right column is what was often also true, and harder to write down.

Nine different symptoms. Read the third column downwards and it is broadly one cause, wearing nine outfits.

The question that produces the longest silence

There is a question I ask in rooms now, and it reliably produces a pause: who owns the moment between "interested" and "contracted"?

The silence is the answer. Marketing has handed over. Sales is waiting on procurement. Customer success has not been introduced. The buyer is standing in a gap in our org chart holding a decision they cannot complete, and because no function owns that gap, every team reports it honestly as a symptom of their own.

Three ways to act on the cause rather than the symptom

Not a programme. Three moves, any of which fit inside a fortnight.

Separate no-decision from competitive loss in your CRM. One extra field. You cannot fix something you do not count, and most businesses are hiding their largest loss reason inside their second largest.

Put a number on doing nothing, in their numbers rather than yours. If inaction carries no cost, waiting will always be the rational choice, and no amount of enthusiasm from your champion changes that arithmetic.

Have sales and marketing write the problem statement separately, then compare them in a room. Twenty minutes, and usually the most uncomfortable meeting of the quarter. If the two sentences do not match, your buyer has been reconciling them on your behalf for years.

None of those are difficult. That is rather the point. The difficulty was never in the remedy. It is in staying with a cause long enough to act on it, when every instinct in a well-run business is to hand the problem to whichever function can most plausibly be held responsible for the symptom.

If a deal dies of nothing in particular, that is not the buyer failing to decide. That is us failing to make deciding possible.