Because high-ticket B2B Deals are not lost in the funnel – they stall in decision.

In many companies offering complex or higher-priced products, double-digit percentages of already “forecasted” sales opportunities are lost every year.
And this happens long before your customer tells you. Or before your sales team reports that contacts have stopped responding.
Of course, successful sales are impossible without proper sales management, including CRM oversight, team leadership and enablement, competitive positioning, and pricing. But that alone may not be enough.
Without a comprehensive, sales-driven evaluation of marketing-generated or sales-generated leads, particularly regarding the customer’s decision-making structure, companies often fail to sell effectively.

Because what is selling, when reduced to its essence? It is helping someone want to say “yes” and actually do so. But how can that work if the sales team lacks clarity about the customer’s decision processes and is left alone to figure them out? If stalled leads are assessed only through our internal data, rather than through an expanded, empathetic understanding of the information customers need to make a positive decision?

Do all individuals involved in the customer’s decision process have the information they need to assess performance, security, trustworthiness, compliance, and long-term value, tailored to their specific use case? Or are we expecting sales teams to initiate opportunities with a broad-brush approach and rely on detailed requirement engineering only after the customer has expressed concrete interest?

This is where leads freeze in the pipeline.

Because during the customer evaluation phase, the buying center — the group of decision-makers and stakeholders on the customer side — is often not considered with sufficient empathy from a sales perspective. Do the messages being communicated truly address all the needs and pains of both direct and especially indirect stakeholders? Are their organizational roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities even touched upon in our (your!) sales presentations — let alone fully covered?

And are we taking into account that a rigid funnel may not reflect the reality of how decisions are actually made?

Google’s comprehensive study from 2020 analyzes why so many leads get “stuck” in the sales funnel. Google’s representation of a dynamic alternative funnel is called the Messy Middle Model.

The focus on your customers’ internal decision-making processes is often overlooked, especially when multiple people are involved (specialist departments, purchasing, management, stakeholders, etc.). This alone requires a dynamic complexity in the management of sales teams and processes that is difficult to represent and execute in linear funnels and corresponding CRMs alone.

be nice uses flexible and customer-centric approaches to identify precisely these structural challenges and work with you to solve them. So that opportunities can once again be converted into predictable deals.

Take our free 3 minute self-assessment quiz here and receive immediately individual results explaining why you are losing lower-funnel revenue.