How to Stop Losing Deals to Indecision

It is getting more difficult, more expensive, and noisier to win by sheer force or volume at the top of the funnel. More teams are looking for different opportunities — and one of the largest sits in the mid-funnel, where perfectly good deals are quietly dying.

The data from The JOLT Effect is clear: for most companies selling anything on the more complex end of the spectrum, more than half of losses come from the buyer deciding to do nothing at all. Not choosing a competitor. Not rejecting the product. Just staying in the "maybe" category for an extended period of time. And there is a second, sleepier cost: even in deals that eventually close, there is often enormous waste in the sales process itself — too many meetings, too many cycles, too much payroll burned getting to yes.

Those "maybes" are doing a huge amount of damage. They suck up energy and resources — POCs, trials, extended evaluations — and the evidence points to this growing over time. There are all sorts of maybes sitting in the pipeline, and those maybes are doing damage that most teams have not learned to measure.

A deal that is genuinely dead and a deal that is suffering from indecision look similar from the outside but require entirely different responses. For example, when a deal has made little progress for three to five times the length of your standard sales cycle, you can consider it stalled at best and probably dead entirely.

Beyond the binary win/loss data, the research team supplemented with hundreds of interviews to understand what high performers were seeing and doing differently in what they call cold feet moments — situations where the buyer seems inclined to move forward and then starts to hem, haw, and backtrack.

Most teams study their wins, typically in qualitative, anecdotal fashion. They rarely study their losses — in part because it is uncomfortable to revisit a deal where the customer decided to go elsewhere or do nothing. Ted's recommendation: spend more time studying your losses in general. But also try to understand what is happening with the maybes — deals that have not yet and may never be formally marked as closed-lost but consume enormous energy, resources, POCs, and trials.

Indecision is most often rooted in what the research calls the fear of messing up. The buyer has already moved past asking is this valuable? and should we change? — they have answered yes to both. What stalls them is the next question: what if we do this and it goes wrong?

This fear has several sources. Some are personal — certain people in the buying group are simply less comfortable with ambiguity, the same way some people struggle to pick something off a restaurant menu. Others are experiential — they have seen bad implementations, been oversold in the past, or watched someone get blamed when a project went sideways. And there is a growing flavor driven by market velocity — the fear that whatever they commit to today will be obsolete in three months as the market shifts underneath them.

Different people in the buying group will experience different intensities and different forms of this fear. And you will often not hear about it directly, because the person you are talking to may be enthusiastic while the resistance is circulating internally among people you have never met.

What is most insidious about indecision is that it is often cloaked in enthusiasm. The buyer loves everything they see. They want to touch and feel every feature. They ask for more demos, more information, more proof points. Sellers read this as strong engagement. But excitement about the potential of a solution and confidence about the decision to buy it are two very different things. Excessive requests for detail — more references, another POC, one more case study — are often signs of a buyer who cannot commit, not one who is close to committing.

The first recommendation runs counter to how most sellers operate. Rather than waiting to see indecision and then reacting, assume it exists from the start and act accordingly. With 87% of opportunities showing moderate to high indecision, the odds are strongly in favor of it being present — you just may not have found it yet, particularly if you haven't spoken with enough people in the buying group.

A ping is a deliberate, empathetic probe designed to name the fear the buyer might be experiencing. A good starter phrase: "I'm getting the sense that…" followed by your hypothesis about what is holding them back. The power of pings is that you do not need to be 100% right. Even an inaccurate ping unlocks the real concern — the buyer corrects you and in doing so tells you what is actually weighing on them. "It's not quite that, but it is kind of this — I'm glad we're having this conversation."

Indecision can live with one person or be circulating through the broader buying group. Your champion may be proactive and enthusiastic while hitting resistance internally that never surfaces in your sales conversations. This is why multi-threading is not just a nice-to-have — it is how you uncover risk you would otherwise be blind to. The second big source of fear — past negative experiences with implementations or being oversold — often lives with people you have never spoken to.

Beyond conversation intelligence, there are operational indicators: deals stalling in stage longer than expected, insufficient multi-threading, and gaps in the buying group you haven't yet mapped. Ted recommends building a battery of measures across three buckets: things you can do to prevent indecision, things to spot and size it, and things to treat it.

Most teams treat the buyer's journey as a linear sequence — first the buyer decides they want to change, then they evaluate options, then they assess risk. But that is not how real decisions work. Buyers walk in the door already wondering what could go wrong. The fear of implementation failure, personal blame, and obsolescence is present from the very first conversation, not something that appears only at the end.

The implication is that value-based and fear-based objections need to be treated simultaneously, not sequentially. Who among us has not been oversold in the past? That experience is in the room from the start, whether anyone has said it out loud or not.

The JOLT framework — Judge the indecision, Offer a recommendation, Limit the exploration, Take risk off the table — is straightforward to understand intellectually. But three gaps appear consistently when teams try to put it into practice.

Buyers often talk themselves into big, transformative change. That excitement is great for the sale — but transformation is difficult and thorny. Questions will surface about how it all works, what the safety net looks like, and how the team gets to outcome success. The failure is that sellers let the buyer's ambitions run unchecked instead of proactively setting practical, achievable levels of expectation. This was one of the most important variables in the JOLT model.

Sellers instinctively defer to the buyer: "You know your business better than I do." But for an indecisive buyer, that deference just foists the hard choices back in their lap. The data shows that high performers get prescriptive — not just about why to buy, but about what to buy and how to buy it. Instead of presenting a menu of options and letting the buyer navigate, they recommend a specific path and explain why.

A common pushback from sellers learning JOLT: "If I start raising these risks to the buyer, won't I incite the fear?" The answer is twofold. First, these concerns will surface at some point regardless — better to play offense and get ahead of them. Second, raise the risk and have an answer. Don't just name the potential problem and leave the buyer to sit with it. Use it as a way to show how you handle this, what has happened in past implementations, and what safeguards exist. Raising the fear without a treatment plan is worse than not raising it at all.

• Set practical outcome expectations early and proactively, even when the buyer is enthusiastic about a bigger scope. Clarity matters more than ambition.
• Be prescriptive. "I don't think you need this — you need this, for these reasons, and here's how I would suggest we move forward."
• Name the risks before the buyer does, and pair each one with a specific, credible answer. The earlier this happens, the better.

Asked what single question he would use to diagnose a deal in a QBR, Ted's advice: assume there is some form of fear of messing up affecting the buying group and ask the seller to describe what they have heard. What was the buyer's reaction to the proposal? What concerns have surfaced? What was said, and what was the tone?