ARTICLE
Some of the revenue you need is already in your pipeline
Every month you ask about the same six deals. Every month they are progressing. The buyer went quiet in March, came back in May with a question about implementation, and it is still sitting at sixty percent, closing next quarter.
Some of those deals are closer than they look. Some of them died months ago and nobody has said so.
The cost is not the dead ones. It is that they look identical to the live ones, so they keep drawing the same effort. Calls get made, proposals get revised, close dates get moved. Meanwhile the deals that could actually convert get the same generic attention as the ones that never will, and the answer to a thin quarter becomes more leads. New leads are the slowest and most expensive revenue available to you. The fastest is usually already in the system.
Five states, and four of them look the same in a CRM
Before you can fix a stalled deal you have to know whether it is stalled.
Active complexity. The cycle is long, but the buyer owns a specific next step with a date on it, and the decision work is moving. Long is not the same as stuck. Leave it alone.
Delay. Something has moved for a reason the buyer has confirmed. A board date shifted, a technical dependency slipped, the budget cycle changed. There is a replacement date or a clear condition for restarting.
Stall. No observable buyer commitment. The opportunity has been in this stage materially longer than deals you have actually won, with no confirmed explanation. This is the point where “still interested” stops counting as evidence.
Commercial zombie. Seller activity continues, so the CRM looks busy. Emails, revised proposals, close dates moving. What is missing is any visible buying process. The deal is being kept alive from your side.
No-decision. The initiative has been suspended, abandoned, or quietly retained as the status quo. It is rarely stated. It usually just becomes next quarter.
The flags worth checking
Seven signals that an opportunity needs inspecting.
- No buyer-owned next action with a named owner and a date
- The decision date exists because your team entered it, not because the buyer confirmed it
- The close date has moved more than once with no new external fact behind it
- Stage age is materially above your own comparable won deals
- Activity is concentrated on the seller side
- The economic buyer, the procurement route or a significant absent stakeholder is still unknown
- The buyer keeps asking for material and gives nothing back: no meeting, no internal introduction, no agreed decision step
Use your own stage history rather than a universal number of days. Ninety days is healthy in one market and terminal in another.
None of this needs me. You can run your top twenty opportunities through it this week and the forecast will be more honest by Friday.
What it will not tell you is why the same deals keep landing in the same state.
Your case gets read without you in the room
The meeting went well because the person in the room understood you.
The decision does not happen in that room. Your deck gets forwarded. Your proposal is read by a finance director who has never met you, alongside two competitors, on a Thursday afternoon, with nobody there to explain what you meant. A technical lead marks it against criteria you never saw. Procurement checks whether it fits a process built for something else.
Whatever you handed over has to work on its own, in front of people whose job is to find the reason not to proceed.
When it does not, you are told the timing was wrong.
Three reasons deals stall, and two of them need opposite fixes
There was never a deal. The buyer was interested, and interest is cheap. They did not own the problem, the budget or the consequence, and nobody in the room could change that. This one does not get fixed. It gets qualified out, and the earlier the better, because it is the state that most convincingly imitates a live opportunity.
They did not understand it. The proposition is abstract. The proof is generic. The difference between you and the next supplier is not stated in words a non-expert can repeat. This is fixed with clarity and specifics.
They understood, and saying yes is expensive. They have to displace a supplier, defend a budget line, revise a decision someone in the room made last year, or carry the blame if it goes wrong. Adding proof does not help. It makes your case stronger and their decision harder. They end up with a well-argued proposal they still cannot afford to champion, so it sits.
The instinct when a deal stalls is to send more proof. That is right for the second problem and actively wrong for the third.
Guess wrong and the rewrite fails, the new deck fails, the extra proof fails, and you conclude the market is difficult.
Working out which one you have
That answer is not usually visible from inside the business, because the thing causing it is the thing everyone has stopped noticing.
Agencies are generally brought in to execute: build the website, run the campaign, make the content. I work a step earlier, on what the commercial case has to do before anyone builds anything. The engagement for that question is the Commercial Clarity Review.