Somewhere inside every stalled deal, there’s a buyer who couldn’t make the argument for acting — not to the seller, but to their own colleagues. Maybe that’s a chief financial officer asking why now, or a senior leader whose priorities were set last quarter.
A buyer can understand the problem, agree with the seller’s diagnosis, and still not move. Wanting the solution isn’t enough. The champion has to defend the budget, explain to the team what’s going to change and why the disruption is worth it, and somehow get this problem onto a priority list that’s already full — usually without the seller present.
The internal case is where deals stall.
Busy buyers and tight budgets are part of today’s sales environment. But maybe the bigger issue is what’s happening inside the buyer’s decision-making process. Buying committees keep growing, and every added voice brings another concern to address — another place for the deal to slow down or disappear.
It often falls to one person — the champion — to carry that argument inside the organization. Sometimes they’re doing that while multiple initiatives are competing for the same budget or a senior executive is asking, “Why this, why now?”
Recent RAIN Group research identifies several issues facing sales teams that trace back to the decision itself: respondents cite longer sales cycles (83%), deals lost to no decision or the status quo (82%), more decision makers and buying committees (80%), and buyer budget constraints (79%) as challenging. When the internal argument isn’t strong enough, the deal often stalls.
Activity is not progress.
That doesn’t mean the buyer says no.
Maybe they ask for more information, say the timing is tricky, that the budget needs another look, or that the team still has to align.
At this stage, sellers often respond by increasing activity — another meeting, a revised proposal, one more follow-up email. None of that is necessarily wrong, but more activity won’t fix an unclear case for change, and a shaky opportunity doesn’t get healthier with another touchpoint.
It’s easy for sellers to misread the situation as a follow-up problem, or a closing problem. But often, the trouble started earlier — the business impact was never sharp enough, or the seller assumed the decision process instead of mapping it and never knew who else had to weigh in.
The seller’s work to avoid this situation has to start earlier. One way to do this is to identify stakeholders and jointly develop a buyer change blueprint: a shared summary of the buyer’s current pain, what success looks like, why change matters now, and how the solution helps them get there.
When it works, the collaboration itself builds buy-in and the buyer walks away able to defend the decision without you. They understand why this path beats the status quo, and the cost of doing nothing.
Your champion has to carry the case.
A champion saying “I’m on board” does not mean the organization is ready to move.
Everyone around the decision is looking at it through a different lens. The CFO wants to know whether the numbers hold up. The functional leader is thinking about the disruption. Procurement may drag the conversation back to price, and somewhere up the chain, an executive is asking whether the problem is even big enough to act on this year.
Each stakeholder is evaluating the decision through different risks, priorities, and success measures. The seller’s goal is not to rely on the champion to sell alone, but to help the champion build alignment with the people who can advance, block, fund, or reshape the decision.
This is where sellers must do more: anticipate questions before they surface, bring the right people in early, and shape the value story around what each stakeholder cares about. By the time procurement reopens pricing or a senior leader questions the priority, the seller may already be late.
Progress happens when the buyer can say, in their own words, why the current situation can’t continue. “We’re losing too much time here.” “If we don’t address this, it slows down the rest of the business.”
That’s what sellers have to help buyers build. Unfortunately, many sales enablement programs don’t prepare sellers well enough for that work.
Managers have to coach for buyer progress.
Sellers shouldn’t be in this alone — managers also have a role to play. They need to coach sellers for evidence that the buyer is moving.
The usual pipeline check-in doesn’t get far enough:
Manager: “What’s the next step?”
Seller: “I’m following up next week.”
That might be true. It also says very little about the strength of the opportunity.
Better questions are:
- What did the buyer actually commit to?
- Who else has to weigh in?
- Where is this most likely to stall?
- What happens if they do nothing?
- What business impact have they confirmed?
The thread that runs through all of these: What is the buyer ready to do?
For example, if a manager asks, “Who else has to weigh in?, a weak answer is, “My contact is taking it to leadership.” A stronger answer is, “The CFO and COO both need to support it. My champion is meeting with them Thursday, and we’ve built the case around the cost of delaying the decision.”
If managers aren’t equipped to coach this way, training is much less likely to change what sellers do in live opportunities. If coaching conversations reward meetings booked and proposals sent, sellers will just keep managing activity.
Prepare the buyer to keep the deal moving.
Sellers still need core skills: running real discovery, communicating value, handling objections, negotiating, and gaining commitment. But those skills only create consistent results when they are applied in the context of how buying works today. Sellers must perform well in the conversations they are part of. But they also must prepare buyers for the conversations the seller will never hear.
That means equipping the buyer with a clear reason to act, a defensible business case, and answers to the questions they’re likely to face. Managers can help sellers test whether the buyer has what they need to keep the decision moving internally — and where the opportunity is likely to stall if they don’t.
“What does the seller need to do next?” usually produces more activity.
Sellers who make that shift — from managing their own next step to equipping the buyer for theirs — are better positioned to close deals that might otherwise be lost to inaction.