What most often causes deals to be lost: competitors or buyer indecision?

Ben Fiechtner · Aug 2, 2024

The biggest reason deals don't close is that the rep didn't understand the client's internal buying process — which is why the most painful losses are deals sitting in commit.

Deals in commit are ones where you're the vendor of choice, so losing them is a process failure, not a preference failure — the rep trusted the champion instead of helping them sell internally.

25:35 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari

John McMahon · Nov 28, 2025

Deals are typically lost because the rep skipped a step in the sales process

When you diagnose a loss and retrace everything the rep did, you find the skipped step

Scope: stated as the typical case

11:17 20Sales: John McMahon on How to Hire, Train & Retain the Best Sales Reps | How Sales Changes in a World of AI | Sales Lessons from Snowflake and MongoDB | How to Create and Drive a Sales Process with Urgency

Matt Plank · Dec 20, 2024

The number one reason deals are lost is indecision — prospects staying with their existing solution — not losing to a competitor

At Rippling, roughly a third of closed-lost reasons are unresponsive prospects and another chunk are 'holding off for now'; win rates on actually decisioned deals are much higher

Scope: based on Rippling's closed-lost data; Rippling rips and replaces an existing system nearly every time

5:12 20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

The number one reason deals don't convert is status quo, not competitors — and losing to status quo means you failed to identify a real pain point or weren't in front of the right person

Companies stuck in their ways don't see a big enough problem and do nothing; using the 'why change, why your product, why now' framework, a no-decision signals bad discovery or wrong stakeholder

64:10 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Deals slipping at quarter end are usually a symptom that the value of the solution was not well understood by the buyer relative to competing internal projects.

Customers can only run so many projects with so many dollars, so the seller's job is to make the business case explicit before it reaches the CIO or CEO.

7:13 Value not understood relative to competing priorities causes slippage

Patrick Forquer · May 11, 2026

Enterprise losses come down to multi-threading — failing to build a one-to-one relationship with even a single member of a law firm's decision panel can lose the deal, because the loudest unmet voice tends to get what they want

Law firm decision making is opaque and panel-based; in their lost deal there was one panel member they never got time with while the competitor did

43:23 One unreached decision panel member loses the deal