Why Good Opportunities Slip Away
You lost a deal you should have won, and the sting is still fresh. You could point to price, but that’s not where the real story begins, or ends.
It’s almost never just about price. Missed deals are the symptom, not the cause. The real issues run deeper, lurking in sales fundamentals most people skip.
Weak Discovery Ruins Everything
“Price is an excuse for bad sales process, bad sales skills.”
Skip discovery and everything else suffers. Too many deals clog the pipeline because salespeople jump straight to pitching, not understanding. They don’t know if the deal even fits their ideal customer profile. They might not even be talking to the right person.
Asking the right questions uncovers if you’re dealing with a decision-maker or just a friendly contact. Without mutual trust, you’ll never get the truth. Trust is when the customer shares proprietary information and lets you into their real priorities.
Urgency: The Two-Way Street
No urgency? No deal. Both sides have to feel it, and both sides have to help create it.
Customers today only buy what addresses their single top priority, and not the second or third. Understanding customer KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is the single best compass for action. Not only do KPIs reveal what matters to the business, but they also show what matters personally to the decision maker.
“Decisions are being made today not just on behalf of the company they work for, but on the individual.”
Always ask: What’s the impact of making no decision? If there isn’t enough pain in staying put, you’ve got nothing to build urgency on.
Sell Solutions, Not Products
Selling is not about showing off features or benefits. It’s about aligning with the customer’s buying journey and timeline.
Are you pushing a sale before the customer can actually buy? Miss the mark on timing, priorities, and implementation reality will sink your best deals fast.
“You have to be able to alter your selling process to fit the customer’s buying process.”
Learn their timeline. Learn the approval path. Learn what test drives or proofs of concept they need to feel confident. If you can’t adapt to how they buy, the deal dies even if your features are a perfect fit.
Assumption Selling: The Silent Killer
Assumptions kill deals quietly. When is the last time you validated what matters to your prospect, how they make decisions, or even if your terms match their expectations? It’s painful to discover late, but if payment terms or delivery logistics don’t align, the sale was never in your hands to begin with.
Never hide behind the excuse of price, especially when payment terms or approval processes were the silent deal breakers all along.
Integrity and Confidence Win
Assumptions fill the gaps when salespeople aren’t confident or comfortable enough to ask tough questions. More often than not, deals die in the pipeline and forecasts go up in smoke because the real qualifiers were never addressed.
This is where integrity matters: honest questions, real accountability, authentic answers. Get tough conversations on the table early, so your pipeline shows opportunities you can actually win.
“If you don’t get these conversations out on the table early, what happens is you wind up with these in your pipeline and all it does is clog up your pipeline.”
Here’s the Playbook
- Stop blaming price. Look at the process.
- Ask the tough questions. Validate the relationship.
- Find the real urgency—yours and theirs.
- Make sure your solution fits their priorities and their timeline.
- Kill assumption selling before it kills your pipeline.
Don’t hope for the deal. Win it by mastering the basics and having the confidence to get real. That’s how lost deals become wins.
Mark Hunter :
Why are you losing deals that you should win? Hey, it’s not about your price. Let’s get past that. Price is an excuse for bad sales process, bad sales skills. The show begins right now. You’re listening to the Sales Hunter podcast with Mark Hunter, where the focus is to help you as a salesman, sell with confidence and integrity. And now here’s your host. Yes, I’m being a little bit blunt. Why are you losing deals that you should win? And it’s not because of price.
Mark Hunter :
People use price as the excuse because their selling skills were just not up to snuff. But let’s cut to the chase. Let’s cut to some of the reasons as to how we overcome that. And it starts with weak discovery. Weak discovery destroys more deals than you can ever possibly imagine. Why? Because here’s the whole thing. You don’t even know if it’s fitting within your icp. I mean, it’s amazing the number of salespeople that I work with who are saying, hey, help me with this deal, help me with this deal.
Mark Hunter :
And then we begin to go through that or begin to realize that it doesn’t even fit their icp. Or how about this one? Are you even talking to the right person? And how have they proved to you that they’re the right person? Just because they’re taking your, your calls, taking your conversations, that they’re meeting with you, they’re showing an interest. That does not mean that they’re the person who can make the decision. That just means they’re interested. And here’s the deal. Have they proved to you anything of value? In other words, is there a level of trust? Before you come out of the discovery phase, there has to be an element of trust between you and the other person. And that means, way I see this is when customers are sharing with you proprietary information, they’re sharing with you insights that are not known publicly. They’re only going to do that if they have a level of trust in you.
Mark Hunter :
You see, hey, weak discovery. It’s amazing because what happens is salespeople are so quick to try to get to the close that they forget that you can’t forget the basics. Here’s the other piece. Is there, Is there urgency? Is there urgency created by the customer? And is there urgency created by you? And believe me, this is actually a two way street. This is a two way street. You both have to create urgency for one another. Let me unpack this. You see, we got to find out what’s their need to buy now, what is their need now, and how do you know this? Too many times what happens is you may have a great idea, great solution, great, great answer, and it’s important.
Mark Hunter :
Oh, it can help. But if it doesn’t fit their critical needs right now, they’re going to pass. And more than ever right now, in today’s economy, customers are really only going after I, I used to say their top one or two priorities. Now I say it’s just their top one priority. That’s it seems like, yeah, they’re getting very tight because the question I’ve got to ask myself is how does this fit into their other priorities? This is going to help you really begin to understand as to whether or not there’s urgency. Because if they have other KPIs that they know they have to address and, and your solution is going to help clear the, the, the road for them to achieve these other KPIs and they got to get this done quickly. If, on the other hand, as you, as you begin to understand what their priorities are and what their KPIs are, and you see that yours is really kind of the last in line, guess what? There’s not going to be as much urgency. And you notice I use the word KPI.
Mark Hunter :
Do you know what your customers KPIs are Key Performance indicators. Don’t hesitate to ask them this. I have found myself asking, asking decision makers, everybody I’m working with more and more lately, what are your KPIs? And it’s amazing. This does a couple things. One, it’s a demonstration of trust, because if there’s no level of trust, they’re not going to share that with you. But if there’s a level of trust, they share that with you. So that right there is a great marker that, that is a great marker. But two, by understanding their KPIs, I’m going to really begin to understand what are they evaluated on.
Mark Hunter :
And remember, decisions are being made today not just on behalf of the company they work for, but on the individual. Because no individual wants to make a decision that’s not going to help them be more successful at where they’re going. Yeah, here’s the other piece. How good of an option is no decision to them? Ooh, this drives urgency big time. Maybe they have a current supplier, maybe they have a current solution that they’re using. And if what you’re providing is not significantly better, then there’s no urgency. Yeah, they could improve, but in light of everything else they have going on, it doesn’t. So I gotta understand what is, what is the probability of no decision.
Mark Hunter :
And what could drive that no decision? That’s a question you ask. What happens if you don’t address this problem? What happens if you don’t do something? Ask them that question. Now, have you done anything to really explain to them TCO and tbo. Now, tco, you’ve probably heard before, that’s total cost of ownership. Total cost of ownership. Because many times what happens is what you provide. It may be expensive. It basically is an investment.
Mark Hunter :
You’re looking for them to buy this software, buy this equipment, buy this whatever. It’s an expense. It may be either an expense or a capital expenditure, but it’s money going out the door. But the total cost of ownership, because of them making that investment, they’re going to be able to return X. That is so key. That’s tco. But there’s also tbo, Total benefit of ownership. Total benefit of ownership is, is this going to help them do other things that maybe are a little harder to quantify? Maybe it’s going to help reduce turnover.
Mark Hunter :
Maybe it’s going to improve customer satisfaction. Maybe it’s going to improve certainty of something, whatever it might be. Maybe it’s going to change the brand positioning the company has in the marketplace. Tbo, Total benefit of ownership in an upcoming episode. I’m going to. I’m going to unpack that all the way for you. Now, here’s something that I want you to think about as to why we might be losing deals. Are you too focused on your solution now? What? I mean, your solution, because you’ve been really.
Mark Hunter :
It’s your product. It’s your product and you know your product well and you know exactly where you’re going. And, and that’s all. That’s. And. And you’re excited about that. But here’s the whole thing. Has this been all about you? Do you know what the customer’s buying journey, slash timeline, looks like? What’s the customer’s buying journey? In other words, are there committees that they’ve got to take it to? Is there proof of performance that they’ve got to go through? Are there other departments they’ve got to get involved? What’s the journey? What’s the timeline? How long is all this going to take? Because again, many times what happens is we don’t win deals that we feel we should win.
Mark Hunter :
We have all the validation. We have everything, everything proved out. Tco, tbo, everything lines up. But because the timeline that they’re on is two years, I can’t move that up due to budgeting, whatever it Might be. Now, have you validated the impact your solution could have on them and how did they do this? In other words, this is a question you want to find out from them. Hey, we put this software in place, have you run some numbers as to what this is going to do for you, how this is going to impact your business and what’s that going to look like? Again, don’t hesitate to ask them that type of a question. Why? Because it’s going to get a conversation going and what’s going to happen is it’s going to wind up creating a conversation around some things that. Oh, whoa, wait a minute.
Mark Hunter :
I as a salesperson can’t do that. Why are you scared? Are you scared? You can’t be concerned about dealing with the uncomfortable because remember you’re asking them to make a buying decision that’s probably going to make them uncomfortable. So you better be able to have that. Yeah, yeah. Here’s one for you. It didn’t align with decision process. In other words, what happens is you had a great solution, you have a great testimonials, you, you’ve got everything lined up. But because of how you sell it didn’t align with their decision process because you weren’t able to give them a test drive.
Mark Hunter :
You weren’t allow, you weren’t allowing them to really come up with proof of concept or proof of performance. Critical. Yeah, you have to be able to alter your selling process to fit the customer’s buying process. I’ve worked with a lot of companies over the years. They say no, we never allow companies to test drive our product because they never get around to doing it. Okay, fine, I totally understand that. But maybe it says that I’ve got to do a test drive but it’s got to be a hands on test drive. In other words, I’m going to test drive it with you, something of that nature.
Mark Hunter :
But you’ve got to be able to address their, their needs. Is what you offer and how you deliver it compatible with how they need things? I saw this recently with a company I was working with. They sell a physical product but because of the quantity and the shipping process and so forth, it just didn’t fit to how this company, how the customer could receive it could handle it. There was just, there was no sale and this should have been uncovered in the discovery phase. You got to understand how is this going to be implemented? How is this going to be rolled out? How are you going to hand find this out early? Because no price is going to get around that. But I see salespeople so they say, oh, well, if our price had just been lower, we, we could have gotten the deal. No, because what you had didn’t align with their, with their decision process, with their operations, with how they do things. Yeah.
Mark Hunter :
What about payment terms, Credit lining up between you and the customer? Oh, this, this happens all the time. It’s amazing, that, that. And this is where salespeople will use the quick excuse, the easy excuse, the easy out. Oh, well, you know, I didn’t get the sale because our credit department wouldn’t extend enough credit, wouldn’t extend the right terms. Okay, but why did you come all the way down to the end of the road before you found that out? Maybe you should have done better due diligence up front. You see, what happened was you wound up with a sales process, you wound up with a sale in your pipeline. You wound up with, with something that your boss was expecting you to get, and then it’s not going to happen at the end because of really something that you should have checked off earlier. Yeah, I’m going through a lot of things here.
Mark Hunter :
I know, I know. But I’ll tell you what it comes down to. Are you guilty of assumption selling? Now, I’ve done this too many times myself. Are you guilty of assumption selling? We make assumptions as to what they’re going to do without any verification. Yeah, we see this most often when the customer chooses to make no decision or the customer rejects your price. And oh, by the way, I always see salespeople when they, when they report back to management, oh, well, hey, they chose not to make a decision. It’s because the price was too. It’s.
Mark Hunter :
Oh, no, it’s not about price. It’s because you really fail to, right up front, find out the right information. There’s a reason why I wrote the book Integrity first selling because a lot of what I was talking about uncovers a lot of difficult pieces, and it can be hard for a salesperson who is not grounded in a level of integrity. What does that mean? That’s trust, accountability, authenticity. It means doing what you say you’re going to do and creating a level of dialogue with the customer to allow these types of conversations to come out early. Because again, if you don’t get these conversations out on the table early, what happens is you wind up with these in your pipeline and all it does is clog up your pipeline. And at the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, there’s no way you can close the deal because it just wasn’t meant to be. Closed.
Mark Hunter :
This is. This is a real problem. And it comes back to salespeople not being willing, not being comfortable, not being confident enough to ask the difficult questions. So then what they do is they make assumptions. They make assumptions. This is why so many times deals in your pipeline are overstated in terms of the dollar amount, in terms of the time frame with which they’re going to close. I remember sitting in a forecasting call with a CRO and his regional vice presidents, and it was spooky, but they were sitting there putting numbers into a system that it was smoking dope and jumping rope. Not even close.
Mark Hunter :
And all of this was based around hyperbole, assumptions. None of it came to pass because at the end of the day, none of the salespeople, none of the regional vice president sitting in the room had any kind of trust established with their customers, let alone with their salespeople. Yeah. Get the book. Integrity first Selling. Hey, I want you to make sure that you’re leaving me a comment. Whether you’re catching this on Spotify or. Or Apple.
Mark Hunter :
Leave me a comment. Leave a comment. Which. Because again, it helps share with other people. Reach out to me. Let’s talk. I want to be part of your next sales kickoff meeting also. Yeah, I really do.
Mark Hunter :
Call me. Let’s get blunt, let’s get real, and let’s up the game. You’ve been listening to the Sales Hunter podcast. My name is Mark Hunter, the Sales Hunter. Great selling.
