Ask a seller about the deals they lost last year and most will give you a name. The competitor who came in under them on price. The incumbent with the relationship. The distributor who had the buyer's ear.
Now look at the deals still sitting in your forecast. The quote that went out in the spring. The bid that has been in evaluation since before the summer. The customer who was positive on every call and has still not placed the order.
Nobody beat you on those. Nobody has decided anything at all. That is the deal most of us actually lose, and it rarely shows up in the loss report.
Dixon and McKenna, writing in Harvard Business Review in June 2022, put a number on it. Drawing on more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, they found that anywhere between 40% and 60% of deals are lost to customers who said they intended to buy and then did nothing.
Two things to hold alongside that figure. The authors sell a method built on this research, so they have an interest in the problem looking big. And it is cross industry, not industrial specific. Good industrial data on indecision is scarce, and I would rather say so than dress a general number up as ours.
Forrester came at it from the buyer's side. Its State of Business Buying 2024, published in December 2024 and drawn from more than 16,000 business buyers worldwide, says on Forrester's blog that 91% of purchases stall at some point in the process. Forrester's own press release the same day says 86%. The two figures conflict, the full report is for Forrester clients only, the page does not define what "stall" means, and it is buyers reporting on themselves.
Even with those caveats, the order of the causes is worth reading. Budget and price came first. Third was the buyer's own purchasing process.
Nobody beat you on that deal. Nobody has decided anything at all.
You will recognise at least one of these.
The area sales manager sends the quote. The person they deal with likes it. Then someone they have never met, a buyer, a finance director, a head office category manager, has to sign, and it sits. So they chase the one person they know, who cannot make it move.
The export manager hears from the distributor that the end customer is interested. The trip goes well. Then nothing comes back, and there is no way to see past the partner to the person who actually decides.
The bid manager submits a compliant bid. It goes into evaluation and stays there for months, with no idea who is scoring it.
The sales director watches the team's biggest deals slip a quarter at a time while everyone reports that the customer is positive.
None of those is a loss to a competitor. In every one, the customer simply has not got to a decision, and usually the seller cannot see why.
The natural reaction to a quiet deal is more activity. Another follow up, another call, another revised quote. It feels like deal control. Most of the time it is pressure on the one person in the buying company who is already on your side and is not the one holding it up.
Discounting is the other reflex. Forrester's buyers did put budget and price at the top of the list, so price does matter. But a lower price on a deal nobody has agreed to buy is just a cheaper deal nobody has agreed to buy.
What moves an undecided deal is knowing how the customer is going to make the decision, and who has to be on board before they can.
In my time at Gilkes we took cycle times from 18 to 24 months down to around 12. None of it was clever. Deal control, stakeholder mapping, relentless follow ups, face to face meetings and direct engagement with the customer's technical team. The point was to know who had to move each deal, and to stop letting deals drift while we waited to hear back.
Most of the deals in a stalled forecast are not lost. They are undecided. The work is finding out why, early enough to do something about it.
If you have a deal that has gone quiet, bring it to a free Stalled Deal Review. Thirty minutes on one stalled deal, free, and you leave with where it has actually stopped and the three things to do next. Book it here.
If you want someone in your corner on every deal after that, that is what The Deal Room is for, one to one coaching at $500 a month.
Ground Truth is a paid call that gives you an honest go or no-go on your market, direct with Scott. The $250 deposit is credited if you go ahead, and refunded if we are not the right fit.