You’re not losing to the competition – you’re losing to indecision.
By Brian Sullivan, CSP
After a lost deal, the instinct is to look outward. The competitor had a better price. The other rep had a longer relationship. The contract timing was bad. These are clean explanations, which is exactly why salespeople reach for them first.
But after 35 years of watching deals die, I’ve come to a different conclusion. The most common reason a sale doesn’t close isn’t the competition. It’s the buyer’s inability to make a decision. And more often than not, the rep made it worse by letting that indecision sit there untouched.
The real competitor nobody mentions
In medical distribution, reps spend enormous energy studying competitors – their pricing, their relationships, their product gaps. Not wasted time. But it creates a blind spot, training salespeople to look across the room for the threat when the real obstacle is sitting directly in front of them in the form of a buyer who says, ‘Let me think about it’ and actually means it.
Indecision is not rejection. It’s a human being processing uncertainty about change, risk and the possibility of being wrong. The current vendor is known. You’re the unknown. And for most buyers, the unknown feels riskier than the problem they’re already living with. Most reps respond by presenting harder or following up more – the sales equivalent of hitting the elevator button 14 times because it didn’t arrive fast enough the first time. Your prospect isn’t confused about your product. They’re afraid of their own decision. Your job is to make the cost of doing nothing more visible than the cost of changing.
Five months of checking in
I was coaching a rep named Alex – sharp, well-prepared and good at building relationships. She’d been working a surgery center on an EKG line for five months. The clinical director liked her. Every visit ended with ‘we’re still looking at it.’ Alex kept checking in with updated specs and follow-up emails. Textbook persistence. The problem was she wasn’t moving the deal. She was just maintaining it. Most reps never feel the difference until it’s too late.
When we sat down, I asked her one question: ‘Have you ever asked what happens to their team if this problem is still here six months from now?’ She looked at me the way reps always look when the answer is no.
So, she went back to the customer and asked. The clinical director went quiet – the kind of quiet that means something is landing – and then started talking. About time lost reconciling inconsistent readings. About staff working around a system that hadn’t kept pace with their volume. About a Joint Commission review nobody wanted to walk into with the current setup.
None of it had surfaced in five months of checking in – not because the clinical director was hiding it, but because Alex had never asked the question that made it worth saying out loud.
The deal closed two weeks later. Same product. Same price. Same rep. The only thing that changed was the conversation.
Why buyers really stall
Stalled deals almost always trace back to urgency that was never created. In PRECISE Selling I cover this in depth – your job during discovery is to surface the problems a buyer has been quietly tolerating and make them impossible to ignore. If you do that well, urgency is in the room before you ask for the decision. If you skip it, the stall is yours to own.
The shift that separates reps who win stalled deals from those who don’t: instead of selling the benefits of switching, they expose the cost of staying put. Selling benefits puts buyers into evaluation mode – and evaluation mode is where good opportunities go to die. Expose the cost of doing nothing and the current vendor stops looking comfortable and starts looking expensive.
Get off the fence first
Two people need to make a decision on every sales call. The prospect is one. The other is you. Before you can knock anyone else off the fence, you have to get off it yourself. That means deciding – before you walk in – that you’re going to ask for a commitment. Not hope for one. Not hint at one. Ask for one. Buyers follow decisive people. Communicate uncertainty and they’ll use it as permission to stall.
The deal is rarely as lost as it looks. Most salespeople spend their careers trying to beat competitors. The best learn how to beat inertia. Because the prospect’s biggest obstacle usually isn’t another vendor. It’s the comfort of doing absolutely nothing.
Brian Sullivan, CSP, is the founder of PRECISE Selling and author of “PRECISE Selling: 20 Days to the Top”. With 35 years of experience in healthcare and medical distribution sales, he delivers keynotes, bootcamps, and outsourced sales development for companies nationwide. Contact him at preciseselling.com.