The Known Unknowns that kill B2B deals

Donald Rumsfeld (in)famously said:

“There are known knowns... there are known unknowns... and there are also unknown unknowns.”

Surprisingly, the second unknown - known unknowns - is the one that kills a lot of B2B sales deals. Either due to pressure or due to positive signals, sellers tend not to investigate other angles, putting their deal at risk.

So, is the issue just confirmation bias?

We, sales professionals, are not idiots. We feel encouraged by positive signals. We tend to react even more strongly to negative signals. But how does one react to a signal not present at all? There are a few examples which we are sure you can relate to or have come across:

Demo went well > Business and IT like the solution > Price too high = deal dies
CIO was a former customer > demo was ok > IT likes it > Business delegates to IT > Price is right = deal won
Demo was amazing > Business loves it > IT is reluctantly okay with it > 3 months in, no decision = Is the deal dead or alive?

When there are signals, it is easy to react and correct for them, but when the signal is absent or unknown, then what do we do with the deal? Bin it or continue to report it as stale but keep it in the pipeline, kicking it down each quarter?

It is hard to let go of a deal which looked so good initially, but never materialised into anything meaningful. It is like the ending of a movie without resolving the story… man, they are so annoying!

Typical Unknowns that we know of

Like the standard investigation model for a crime - means, motive and opportunity - stalled or dead B2B deals seem to have a common pattern.

Means: Can the buyer pay for what you're selling — or, for that matter, any solution that solves the problem?
Motive: What is actually triggering this purchase? Growth? Cost cutting? M&A? CIO rotation? Something else?
Opportunity: Do we actually have the opportunity to sell to them? Can we reach the right people, solve the problem and navigate how they buy?

Boiled down, it would be the 3 Whys:

Why are they looking?
Why are they looking now?
Why would they look at us?

We certainly hope you don’t use this model post the death of the deal, no sir! It would be a futile exercise for your quota attainment anyway.

Sales frameworks such as MEDDIC, BANT and others are great at creating a structure that is supposed to help make B2B sales more scientific and pattern-driven. They are great at guiding a running deal, but it is left to the sales team and the organisation as a whole to adopt them and put rigour around them. And we humans are definitely good at following a rigorous process ;-)

Your sales process is NOT your buyer’s purchasing process

Your buyer typically works with their procurement teams to understand how to run a buying process. If there is no procurement involved, then it is worse - they are discovering their internal buying process as they progress.

The buyers certainly don’t care about the linear process in your CRM which tracks your deal as it crosses each deal stage within it. Nor do they care about your manager breathing down your neck to commit as you get further and further down the funnel. We are trying to marry two fundamentally incongruent processes and expecting a clear outcome. Good luck with that!

This is at the heart of the problem. You may be doing lots of demos, setting up meetings with the stakeholders, sending documents, conducting workshops - all excellent work, and the deal looks busy and progressing, but is the buyer’s purchasing process moving forward?

Barring factors such as pricing, discounts or other $/effort levers, a deal’s progression is entirely under the buyer’s control. No matter what your sales leader says, the buyer will buy when they are ready to buy. No push from us as sellers changes that.

So, what do we do then? Just live in the chaos and hope to succeed?

The known part of the unknowns

Anyone who has done more than 3-5 difficult B2B deals tends to see a pattern in a well-progressing deal vs. one that looks iffy. More importantly, to uncover the pattern, they know the difficult but right questions to ask, such as:

What happens next, Mr. Buyer?
Have they allocated budget for this in the planning cycle?
Who is the economic buyer, not the one who signs the agreement?
What is the legal or the security sign-off process? How long does it take and when is it triggered?
How would you execute the programme once it has been purchased or the contract has been signed?
Do we have a single champion or have we cultivated a herd of foxes?
What happens when the client does nothing?
Is the buyer's enthusiasm increasing or decreasing with each passing week?

These are the risks that need to be looked at. This is evidence that can be corroborated from multiple angles and evidence that allows you to see your product or service in your buyer's environment.

This seems very specific to an industry or sector. So I have to make mistakes and get burnt in order to learn?

Not really. If you notice, there are four distinct areas we should focus on:

Buyer Goals - do we know why the buyer is buying? Why now and what is their north star, and in what time frame do they want to reach it?
Deal Risks - Why would they NOT buy from us? Is there buyer inertia?
Mutually agreed plan - are they willing to work together and tick off items to closure? Is there as much commitment from their side as you have to the deal?
Buyer engagement over time - Have more people been brought into the mix, or are we in an echo chamber talking to the same people again and again?

We understand these are difficult to answer and even more difficult to ask your buyer. But the sooner you know, the better it is. The sales methodologies of MEDDIC, BANT and others are good at reminding the seller what they need to know but don’t necessarily structure themselves to a buyer-centric process such as the mutual action plan and engagement tracking.

This is the sales execution muscle that B2B sales team lack. Data points in a CRM have no meaning without buyer context and history. The truth for a deal lies in the trail it leaves as it progresses. It gives us both direction and speed. And we want it to be pointing at us, of course!

The unknowns don't kill deals. Leaving them unknown does.

Find them early. Ask the uncomfortable questions. Follow the buyer's trail. Build up evidence. Get the right answer, not the happy answer.

Better to find out now than three days before quarter end.

Sell with clarity.