Why Aren’t My Deals Closing?

customer indecision indecision jolt effect lost deals skills Jul 17, 2024

3 Things Sellers Miss that Stall Even the Best Deals

By The JOLT Effect Team

It’s every salesperson’s worst nightmare. After weeks, sometimes months, of work that includes prospect research, lead qualification, relationship-building, a seemingly endless number of calls, and maybe even building custom solutions or trials—your prospect turns you down cold…or, more likely, just goes cold entirely. You thought you had it in the bag but failed to close the deal in the end. It’s the worst feeling, especially when you don’t understand why.

If your deals aren’t closing, your first thought may be to blame your closing playbook or even the buyer. Maybe their timing just wasn’t right. Maybe they didn’t value your products or services enough. If you're a manager, you may blame your team and their lack of urgency. You may even invest in solutions to train your salespeople to be more successful—but even these measures may not make a difference if you don’t understand the real problem at hand.

Today, we’ll cover three commonly cited reasons for deals not closing—and then unmask the real culprit behind them.

3 Key Reasons Your Deals Aren’t Closing

First, let’s cover some of the most common reasons we hear people say their deals aren’t closing. These may not be the root reasons—but they are the reasons we often tell ourselves and each other that a deal didn’t make it across the finish line. This is an important distinction!

1. Poor Lead Qualification

Poor lead qualification is a familiar reason a deal might not close. If your screening processes allow unqualified or bad-fit leads through to later stages of the sales process, you’re doing a lot of work to court a prospect who was never going to convert in the first place.

Now, there are many reasons to disqualify a lead, from misalignment to lack of budget—but an often-overlooked reason to disqualify is whether that individual or team has the ability to ever come to a decision to purchase your product or service. Champions who are indecisive and spin into analysis paralysis. Buying committees full of dysfunction who have trouble separating nice to haves vs. need to haves. We can end up wasting a lot of time on buyers that will never come to a decision.

How can you address this? Qualify (and disqualify) deals based on both their ability to buy and their level of indecision.

2. Lack of Understanding Buyer Needs

Another common mistake is not understanding your buyer and their needs. Solutions—even if they’re the product you’re selling—must be tailored to your buyer and their problems. And you can’t tailor a solution without first understanding your buyer’s needs.

A key element of this issue that we often see overlooked is the fact that your buyers need reassurance at this stage in the sales process. In our research, covered in our book The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, we found that when reps combine diagnosis with a strong personal recommendation, win rates increased from 14% to 36%.

When sales reps combined diagnosis with recommendation, win rates increased to 36%

We know that a strong personal recommendation can increase conversion rates. But you can’t make a strong recommendation without understanding the buyer and what they need first!

How can you address this? Spend some serious time working to understand your prospects and their needs upfront so that you can tailor a specific recommendation to their needs later on.

3. Ineffective Follow-Up

Another common reason sales fail is reps' lack of timely and consistent communication. You know how necessary it is to maintain engagement and interest over time, but do you know why?

Buyers don’t always trust that a seller has their best interest in mind. Too often they don’t feel they are working with a trusted expert, so they feel the need to take it on themselves to become that expert…and that’s going to take a long time! No surprise—decision timeframes get pushed out. And a sure fire way to feed, rather than assuage, that concern is to not follow through on promises made in the sales process. This is why those follow-ups matter so much.

How can you address this? Use your follow-up calls, emails, and even meetings to guide your buyers through every step of the sales process. There’s no moment too small and no gesture too insignificant—if you can provide reassurance that this is the right choice, you should.

The Common Denominator: Customer Indecision

What do each of these common reasons deals aren’t closing listed above have in common?

Each of these hazards to a sale shares the element of customer indecision. In short, customer indecision occurs when you lose a sale to the customer’s inability to choose from the options provided, not to a competitor. And as we unpacked above, from lead qualification to the complexity of the sales process, there are key moments of indecision all along the way.

Let’s examine some data for a moment. In the research conducted before creating the JOLT method, we found that more than 50% of “no decision” losses were actually due to customer indecision. That’s the majority of lost deals!

TLDR: If you haven’t considered customer indecision a serious opponent when it comes to closing deals, you should.