How to Fix Stalled Deals (Without Pitch Slapping)

I really want to understand, Steve, but what are you hesitating on here? I can sense there's a hesitation. Most sellers are not going to ask that question because they want to. They always hear the friction.

They're not comfortable and trained and encouraged to expose the friction, even though that's what is. But that's what gets deals forward. Okay. If you're struggling with stalled deals, painfully slow deal velocity, and a pipeline that you feel is full of unqualified opportunities.

Well, we have the show for you. Welcome to Driving Growth, the go to market podcast for traditional B2B businesses that are looking to build systems to create predictable revenue growth. In short, turning their company into a revenue factory. I'm your host, Steve Whittington, president of Roadmap and a believer in one simple truth.

Sustainable growth is not an accident. It's engineered. And my company, Roadmap is a builder of go to market systems. On today's show, Yael Morris, CEO of Decode.

Decode exists to solve the part companies cannot do internally. They run neutral third party conversations with lost buyers and churn customers and capture what actually drove their decisions, not what was said on the sales call. What was said after the deal was over? They then systemize that truth into a revenue feedback system that shows why deals really died, what buyers were afraid of, where confidence was lost, what broke internal approval?

What would have changed the outcome? So teams can stop guessing, stop fixing the wrong problems and stop leaking revenue. They could have kept or recovered. So if you're struggling with stalled deals long, long, close times, or just painfully slow deal velocity and an unqualified pipeline that you don't trust.

This conversation is for you. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited for this.

So I just read your intro, and I think this is like, just the missing knowledge that revenue teams need to be able to succeed. So you're seeing you know, we're seeing deals stall all the time with the folks that we work with. They're not lost. They're not won.

They're just like they just kind of like, you know, they get moved on hold or whatever, like whatever the stage of, you know, purgatory is. And, you know, with what the work that you're doing, what do you think is really going on? Because you're, you're talking to the you're talking to the buyers and you're uncovering the truth. So what's really going on when this happens in pipelines?

So it's yeah, it's really interesting. There's companies mark their deals. They'll be open to move them along different stages based on how they set up their CRM. Right.

They have different stages. They market has stalled. They rock timing. They say ghosted budget.

Not now. A lot of those things are interpretations from a sellers point of view, or they're a polite response that a buyer gives a rep as a cover up for what's really going on. They'll say, not right now, which it actually could mean, not right now. And it's, you know, there's no deal right now.

And so let's follow up in three months when this becomes more of a priority. But there's a lot that goes on that rep stone here. So why do deals start? That's the question, right?

Like why why do deals die? Why do they stop? Sometimes companies are targeting the wrong people. Like that's the wrong persona in the company.

They're able to, thread and can't, you know, equip the champion effectively enough. And who bring in an economic buyer. So they're just not able to have the conversations with the right people. That's one.

Secondly, the buyer still has a problem. There's a problem and there's a pain that they get potentially solve for. But the seller has not established a sense of confidence through a strong ROI case or business case. And therefore the deal gets blocked.

And if it's a champion bringing this to a true decision maker, they can't they're they're not able to sell it internally effectively enough because they haven't built a strong enough business case and is on the seller's, you know, it's the seller's responsibility sellers job to equip the the champion with these numbers to make it an easy. Yes. Sometimes there's like a sheer lack of discovery. And because the seller goes into what I'd like to say is a pitch slap and talk about features rather than really diagnosing it, uncovering the problem and creating a sense of urgency.

The the the buyer is struggling to understand how they could use the solution to solve their problem. They're just seeing features, but there's no context wrapped around it because the problem in pain has been has it been, you know, clarified well enough and defined enough? Those are the main reasons for why deals die. There's also, you know, marketing brings in a lot of leads and marketing and sales don't speak with each other.

And same with, you know, product marketing and sales aren't speaking with each other. And there's a there's a misfit like right there fully just bringing in leads that don't make sense. And sellers aren't doing a strong enough discovery and they get excited that they have leads. And someone saying, oh, not right now.

This seems really interesting. They call this we call this like happy ears because, you know, buyers are nodding their heads and saying, this is really cool. Like super interesting. I love your deck and your pitch while they're thinking in the back of their head like, this is just like not going to go anywhere.

And a seller, you know, thinks, you know, oh, they're like really great opportunity. This is a strong opportunity. This is a deal. But it's not right now or they don't have the budget for it.

So they everything is off of this false information. But no one really knows what's really going on. Okay. I, you just gave me a ton to unpack.

So let me, let me so, so at the beginning, you mentioned about the selling process. And so they get to a stage and then they have the descriptions of where the deal is not right now stalled, ghosted, whatever. Right. So is perhaps the original sin that the selling process is seller centric instead of buyer centric?

1,000% it is. I love that you have addressed that because there is in a CRM, you work CRM all the time. HubSpot, Salesforce. It requires the seller to click a drop down in the, you know, in there, and they just have to take it off.

You know, it's one of their to do list items to, like, fill out the form, budget, timing and just give a response. Okay. So that's the original set. So the second one is the fact what you identified at the end, which I see all the time where we've got, I just it drives me wild that this still exists, the silos of marketing, sales, delivery.

Right. Like, I mean, really, they're all part of the revenue team, like, work together. So when you're getting a lead, which is the wrong persona, but maybe the right ICP, and you know, that responsibility of capturing that lead and targeting the right lead goes back to marketing. But if marketing's in a silo and doesn't have a feedback loop to know that this is what's occurring, well, you know, it's that's not fair.

This there has to be a revenue team that's looking at all this stuff. So, at any rate, so we've got the wrong persona because potentially the teams, well, the teams are misaligned. And, and there's not that information giving back as to who needs to be, targeted. But I want to I want to dig into something that you said, happy years.

So why is it that you think that this person that potentially is the wrong persona, but maybe the right persona has taken a call from marketing. So and then they're just they're just going along because as you said, they're being pitch slapped and whatever. So like but why, why, why is why is that occurring. Why is that call even being taken if, if there's all this other stuff is happening?

I think other in sales organizations there's a not enough sophistication and discipline around disqualification. Okay. There's a lot of scrutiny if you go into like the psychology and the emotions of a seller today, they want to frickin keep their job. They want to hit their quota, they want to book meetings, they want to move deals along.

They want to show that momentum is occurring. Even though this momentum is on false information and they're they're pushing sellers are the sellers job is to hit their quota and to hit specific targets. Their job is not to be the whistleblower in the organization and point a finger at another department and say, you are bringing in the wrong lead. That is a VP of sales responsibility.

It's tough for VP sales to acknowledge these things, because VP of sales is mostly looking at what's happening in CRM. There's a visibility problem, but from a back to your point about happy years, sales is hard, sales is so hard. And even like I'm sure you sell, I sell when we are in a meeting, especially for someone early in their early in their career who were like early stage eyes or stars, and they're in a meeting with a buyer with a prospect and an a prospect is politely nodding along right.

You're like, oh, wait, this is so nice. This is so great. Like, I'm getting good feedback here. I'm not being rejected because most of the time in sales are being rejected.

We're hearing no. So yeah, they then they report a buyer is not going to most buyers are not flat out going to say like sorry like this is not going to work out. They'll they resort to something that's polite because you sat together for 20 minutes, 30 minutes or had a second call, and a buyer is just going to say, honestly, see, we just don't have the budget right now. That's usually not the case.

It's the value story wasn't created. There aren't hard ROI numbers that, you know, you could put in front of a, a CFO and make it an easy yes. Like there's a there's a lot of missing components, but sellers are usually hearing what they want to hear. And then that goes report in to the CRA.

Okay. Let's let's recap this because your, your your spot on. And this was one of the things that we, we dial in on as well. So we identified that the sales process is seller centric.

That we're not actually trying to address, customer concerns. We so we're not finding the reason why we're truly rejected deeper than that is that there is a real lack of customer understanding and what the customers need to move the selling process forward, or move the buyers forward in their decision. And the, the focus is on the metrics first as opposed to the customer understanding. So when we do work, we say, yeah, we have to set the goals, but you're not going to be able to hit any of these goals unless you have deep, deep customer understanding.

And one of one of the things that I see a lot of personas out there have, like you got from a graphics with your ICP, you've got a persona that talks about the person and maybe some of their motivations, but there's nothing about here's what they are facing in their day to day job, the pain. And then here's how you solve for it. And here's what they need to be able to enact it. And when we do that work, we create matrixes on those whole processes so that sellers and marketers are equipped with that thinking.

Right. And if that's not if that's not inherent in an organization, they're going to get what what you're talking about. They're going to get this kind of stuff where it's just picking the drop down and not truly understanding what it is. We'll get back to the show in just a minute.

But first, I wanted to share with you an exciting resource that we have available on our site in the resource sections, the 2025 benchmark report. We did research throughout all of 2025 to reveal where B2B companies are strong, where critical gaps exist across their strategy, their metrics, their sales process, technology, customer retention, all the things. And it also helps leaders decide what they can do next to improve their performance. They can use the report to assess where their systems might be falling short, where they're meeting or exceeding benchmarks, and then critically decide where to focus before investing further in their growth.

Download the report today. Go to our website roadmapagency.com/resources. And now let's get back to the show.

We've we've talked about all this kind of stuff. And it's like how are you uncovering these truths that the companies aren't seeing okay. So what we do as a third party because in a buyer seller conversation, those uncomfortable questions around, like, I really want to understand, Steve, like, what are you hesitating on here? It could sense there's a hesitation.

Most sellers are not going to ask that question because they want to somehow they don't hear the friction. They're not comfortable and trained and encouraged, exposed to friction, even though that's what is that's what gets deals forward. Okay. Okay.

So because we're a third party and we have no stake in the deal, we don't care if you buy or don't buy and how you decide where you allocate your budget, because we're not going to be offended by what you say. We're going to ask those uncomfortable discovery questions that were never asked. So we're going to start off with getting context, like redoing the discovery process essentially. And I'm going to ask you about what was it that led you to even consider working with the company and looking for the solution, and how what?

Tell me about the pains. Like, why? Why are you trying to solve this in the first place? What's the cost of like cost of dealing with it today?

Like how were you dealing with it? How have you have did you evaluate any other alternatives? What alternatives do you go through? And when you were looking at this specific company, what interested you and okay, so that's amazing that it interested you.

Why was that interesting and what did you hesitate upon? What was it that you know made you think, You know what? This might not work. What were the risks at stake there?

What was blocking it, and then what would have changed the outcome? What did you need to see, hear, understand? Go through, speak to whatever for this to actually move forward. We're asking all these questions because those were never asked.

The most important part of this all, by the way, this is not a medpac medic like all those kind of framework thing. It's like these basic questions. And we don't always ask them in this specific sequence. The most important thing is being able to probe and go underneath the surface and not check the boxes.

So if someone says something that is not 100% airtight, crystal clear, we will ask, what do you mean by that? Like help me understand, I'm not like not understanding it perfectly. So and then we'll repeat after them and we'll clarify and we'll listen and we'll actively engage with exactly what they're saying and we'll, you know, reconfirm. Am I understanding you correctly?

Just so we make sure we are on the we're speaking the same language as the buyer. The reason for why buyers open up to us as a third party is because they know that we're detached, we're not selling. Oftentimes they still have a pain, they still have a problem, and they want to get that problem solved. But they were unable to.

And when we asked these questions, it's almost as if we are helping them get to their solution. So when, we come to the end of the discovery and we say, you know, if if X company could have shown you x, y, Z that you just described, would it be worth another conversation? Would you would you be interested in looking at this again. And they'll, you know, 15% of the time say, actually, yeah, like we still haven't addressed this problem.

And now that you've, you know, kind of framed it in this way, it would absolutely make sense to have another conversation with them. Right. So you think of the gold in the pipeline. They're like, you know, you take you know, your lost deals could be 10 million bucks.

Say, and there's 1.5 million just waiting to be picked up. Yeah. Because of lack of customer understanding.

So I, I want to go back to what you said, like the reasons you see things stalled. So you talked about a poor discovery process. And so you're going back in and you're rediscovering. And of course when your third party, they'll open up and you'll get real information because it's, it's objective.

It's, it's, you know, arm's length, all that sort of stuff. And, you know, I get that we do that with our clients, that sort of stuff. But it does point to, again, the reps not being equipped with training, how to do an effective discovery. Correct.

And then all this information that you're gathering equals deeper, deeper customer understanding, which again, that sales team can be trained on this deeper understanding. So then they can they can be equipped, to provide that information, answer those questions to set up a business case, for that. So what I'm wondering about is you are working with an organization, or an organization goes about and somehow does this work by themselves so they now know. Yeah, they know or they've worked with you.

They now know that the discovery process needs to do all this stuff that you just talked about to really uncover the true, pain points, to be able to address them showing or ROI, that sort of stuff. They now know that they need to change their sales process to be buyer centric, instead of selling centric, that sort of stuff. However, the change isn't happening. And and I know this because, you know, I'll work with client organizations and it does take a while for the change to happen, even though the knowledge is in place.

So what are you seeing is stopping that transformation to become a buyer centric, deep customer understanding, providing ROI in the business case, that sort of thing. If we're talking about a sales organization in particular, it's a leadership cultural mentality shift that is required. So it is possible that you will need to bring in some people to train your team and reteach how to do the discovery process. Sure.

It's it's possible that if it's a discovery process problem, if it is a marketing and sales are not speaking to each other and they're targeting the wrong people and they're bringing in the wrong leads, and no one's multi-threading, and there's a positioning issue in the company, then you know what to actually fix. So I think it really depends on where are the gaps. But only really until leadership gets the visibility into why at the deal level, what the heck is going on with the lost revenue?

It's very unclear about what you actually have to change. So I think the question actually is more around what is the business shift in change now? How does the business operate as a result of having this information? And sure, before having this information, there's a lot of shooting in the dark.

There's a lot of, guesswork, a lot of assumptions, and trying to just work on internal hypotheses. What this is doing, it is bringing change makers in an organization. The Intel that they need to make the right changes in the right tweaks. Then I would say from there, it's on leadership to establish what needs to be executed upon.

Okay. There's a couple other layers that I would say here, which is account executives use this as a feedback loop for them in their individual craft. Because what a what this feedback loop is doing is it's giving you essentially deal by deal feedback from your buyer on what was missing and specific recommendations. I mean, that's what we're doing.

We're providing you insight into, you know, what is the truth, what's the storyline from your buyer and what do they need? What is the a you need to know to change for next time? How do you wind back this deal, and how can you reengage a deal? Or when you go into the next deal?

These are some key things you need to be looking for. Yeah. And what we've talked about is there's buckets here that you're seeing over and over again. So, the wrong metrics are being measured.

There's not modeling for the business case, that's being effectively portrayed. You're also seeing, like with the discovery sales process discipline. And then do do these teams actually have the technology and the various different sales, collateral? Like, are they equipped to be able to do this?

So, so like, let's talk about those three buckets, that are kind of like what you're seeing across the board more in most cases. Well, firstly, like to craft an ROI case. What we're realizing with most of the deals, the number one reason for why deals gets lost is because there's just like a lack of clear value case. The sellers are making the assumption that the buyers are buying off of X, Y, z KPIs.

They're not actually asking the question. Okay, so wholly understand how you're making a decision around this. What is your success criteria from a numbers perspective? What KPIs are we trying to hit that question with?

I. We don't listen to our sales calls, but we know that that's going completely missed because we're asking their buyers these questions and our kids are responding well. Like, whoa, like those were the KPI. Those are the KPIs that we should be speaking to.

And we're like, this is a completely blind spot. That's like the most important question you could possibly ask your buyer. That's totally overlooked. So that's like a very simple thing to change with a seller leaning into probing around those, you know, specific ROI like KPIs.

So we've we've really talked about like when we look at what you're uncovering, just a recap for the listeners. Sales process isn't effectively set up. It's it's sale centric as opposed to buyer centric. There's a lack of deep customer understanding, there's lack of sales collateral to actually, solve for the customer's, problems, pain points or show a value proposition that they would want to engage, with whatever it is that you might be doing.

So the ROI case is not being built. There's not it's not easy for them to see that this this makes sense. It's a, you know, you're there's a struggle to say yes. And what you want to do is remove all the barriers to say yes.

And not that that isn't in place. The sellers aren't equipped with that. They're not asking the right questions. So we've got a systematic issue in how we set up the process.

We don't we don't have customer understanding. We're not asking the right questions as a training issue. And then the bit of a targeting issue, we we don't have things qualified. So lots and lots of things make for a really messy, messy pipeline.

Okay, all this said and done, we we we covered off a lot of stuff. What do you think? If you were a sales leader and you're having a challenge hitting, you know, you're accountable for a certain amount of quota. And so you're you're having a hard time hitting it.

What do you think the first thing that they should audit immediately? What would you challenge them to look at. Immediately I would go higher up than a sales leader. I would go like CEO level.

Okay, okay. If I had to scrutinize and looked at Gong recordings, I would first, you know, try and understand how are buyers actually making decisions today? What are they prioritizing? What are best fit customers thinking about and needing to build a sense of confidence to move forward?

What do they need to see? How do we help them de-risk their decision? Why is that important? And I'm looking for deep contextual understanding around how they make a decision.

And if my team can't understand this, like across the board, marketing needs to deeply understand that. Because if your messaging isn't hitting those key things, then you've disconnected your messaging. If you're not reinforcing these kinds of questions from a customer success side, then you don't have a strong grasp and handle on how they're getting value. And on a sell side, equally as important, I think it's more important, equally as important as the rest.

If your sales team isn't probing and deeply uncut, like diagnosing how your buyers understand value and look at value, then you can't sell to them. So number one is how well do we understand the people that we serve, the organizations that we serve? And if there isn't a strong understanding across the board and there's a big massive visibility problem from top down and across, and there needs to be a solution ASAP to get a source of truth on how your customer and buyers think and make decisions.

Well, it really warms my heart to hear you say that. One of the many professional designations I picked up over the years is a customer experience professional. And time and time again throughout my career, working with clients, all this kind of stuff. I have said, you know, I don't care what you think.

I don't care what you think. I can point around the room with a bunch of people in the highest paid opinion is is trying to say, this is what we should do. I go, we really need to understand and care about what the customer thinks and a story. And, that deep lack of customer understanding seems to pop up over and over and over again when things get tough is that they really, really don't understand their customers.

So I appreciate you saying that has to be the first thing. Yeah. So I think we're going to we're going to wrap it up there. There's so much to unpack for people with this.

You know, you've, you've you've gone full circle. We've talked about, you know, the selling process. At the end of the day, though, it comes back to understanding your buyer. And when you understand your buyer and you embed that knowledge across the organization throughout your processes, that's how you win.

Thank you for being on the show. This is awesome. Thanks, Steve. This conversation validates a through line that I've had in my entire career, and and it continues to get validated time and time again.

Success in business success for an organization always starts with deep, deep customer understanding. And that is where your heel said she would start. Go to the top, talk to the CEO and make sure that deep customer understanding gets embedded and infused throughout the organization, so that then your selling process isn't seller centric, it's buyer centric. Then your discovery process is asking the right questions, the kind of questions that the buyer really needs to be answered that you might have, that you might.

They need to be dug into. They might not fully understand their pain. But if you fully understand your buyer because you're doing this over and over again, you'll know the questions they ask. And some of them are uncomfortable.

And then you will have the solution that solves their pain, or provides the value that they need to actually grow and optimize your business. Their business. So it doesn't matter whether it's tech or traditional B2B, the same thing applies the same principle, applies deep customer understanding and apply that to your process of acquisition, to your process of how you continue to do account management and expand so that you are either solving the pain or providing that value, because churn occurs when the buyer's expectations are not met.

So you better understand it and you better get on top of it. And you better make sure everyone in your organization knows what the buyer needs. If you like what you've heard, go to Roadmapagency.com/podcast to download the Revenue Factory Toolkit, in which you will receive mathematical models and a framework for building your go to market system.

Also subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. With new episodes dropping on the first and third Wednesday of every month, I'm Steve Whittington. Thanks for listening. Keep building your revenue factory.

One brick at a time.