... losing to the status quo is the growth brake? -
The most expensive deals I have watched are the ones nobody lost.
I see it most clearly when a company launches an improved product. The improvement is real, measurably better, and the team can prove it. Customers are interested. They take the meeting, ask good questions, say encouraging things. And nowhere in that process does anyone ask whether better is enough better to make a customer change what they are already doing.
Then interest cools. The follow-up takes three weeks to schedule. Momentum leaks away without anything specific going wrong. Only then does anyone find out what the answer was.
Product development is where this shows up most sharply, because a launch has a date on it and you can watch enthusiasm decay against a calendar. The same failure runs through pipelines that have nothing to do with a launch.
There it looks like this. The customer agrees with your value proposition. They like your solution. Everything you were trained to establish, you established, and then nothing happens. There was no competitor and no objection you failed to answer. The deal stopped rather than died.
A loss that does not feel like a loss, which is why it almost never gets diagnosed.
The Test We Don't Run
Establishing that you are the best available option is the right work, and most commercial teams are good at it. They have gotten better at it for twenty years. The discipline around business cases, benchmarking, ROI models and reference customers is real discipline, and I would not want to sell without it.
But it answers a question your customer was not stuck on.
They were never deciding whether your solution was preferable. Their question was whether this problem was worth the disruption of solving, and only one of those was on your slide.
I would rather have the third-best solution to my customer's biggest problem than the best solution to their third-biggest one. The first closes badly and still closes. The second gets everyone's approval and nobody's signature.
The hesitation works against you. Buyers fear making a bad purchase more than they fear missing a good one. The cost of acting is vivid and lands on someone specific, while the cost of doing nothing is diffuse and lands on no one. A problem ranked third never clears that bar. It does not have to be dismissed, only survivable.
Then our trained response makes it stick. When a deal like this stalls, we make the case again. More proof, sharper numbers. It is the most natural move available and close to the worst one, because the customer never doubted your value. You are adding information to a decision that was never short of information. All that arrives is more to weigh, from someone with an obvious stake in the answer.
Actioning the Insight
The useful shift is from testing whether your solution warrants preference to testing whether the problem warrants action. Three questions do most of that work, and you can run them before a launch or before you commit a quarter to a pursuit.
What does this problem cost them each year, and does that clear the cost of changing? Ask about the cost they absorb today rather than the value you would create. If nobody can size it, that is your answer.
Where does it rank against what they have already funded? Budget is the honest ranking. If this problem is not on a funded list somewhere, you are asking them to displace something that is.
Who inside has to absorb the change, and what happens to them if nothing changes? Someone always carries the disruption. If that person is comfortable either way, they will be comfortable waiting.
What these give you is an early read on what you are actually in. They will also disqualify pursuits your forecast currently counts on, which is the point rather than a side effect.
The deals worth having are the ones where doing nothing has finally become the expensive option.
Until next week,
Kendall -
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