Bring a stalled deal

Insights / Deal control

He said yes. He signs the cheques. It still never happened.

A managing director agreed to change his entire fleet and nobody beat me to it. Twenty years later a £1.9M Aramco package started going the same way. What I did differently, and what I do on any deal that goes quiet.

Scott Robinson, 11 November 2026, 4 min read

A managing director told me he wanted to change his entire fleet. Priced, specified, agreed. It never happened, and nobody beat me to it.

I was early in my career at Ford, selling contract hire. I had been taught to sell to the man who signs the cheque, so that is exactly what I did. His service team, his finance people and his management all had their own reasons to stay where they were. He was never going to make his own staff unhappy to please me.

Nobody beat me on that deal. I lost it on my own.

It is not a rare way to lose

In a 2022 Harvard Business Review article, Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna report on more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations. Between 40% and 60% of deals ended up lost to customers who expressed their intent to purchase and then failed to act. The study spans transactional and complex sales across the board rather than industrial sales in particular, and it comes from the authors' own book on the subject, so read it with that in mind.

Gartner asked buyers what goes on inside their buying groups. In a survey of 632 B2B buyers, published in May 2025, 74% of buyer teams demonstrated unhealthy conflict during the decision. That is buyers reporting on themselves. In the same May 2025 release, Delainey Kirkwood of Gartner puts those groups at five to 16 people across as many as four functions.

That is the argument you are not in. It happens while you are sat at your desk waiting for an answer.

Twenty years later, the same deal

Marjan Package 9. £1.9M, through Técnicas Reunidas, for Saudi Aramco. I inherited it late, after a sales restructure. Technical was signed off. The documentation was agreed. The terms were sat there going nowhere.

Same thing as the fleet deal. It looked done and it was not moving.

The difference was that by then I knew whose room the decision was actually in. So I stopped guessing at it through the contractor. I booked a call with Aramco and mapped the timings from the owner's side. Nobody else did that, because everybody else was working the EPC.

Once I had the date the operator needed units on site, the deal had a spine.

I worked the lead time backwards from that date with Borja at Técnicas Reunidas. I ran the bonds and the legal in parallel instead of one after the other. It closed on the operator's on site date. Around 190 units.

I did not push harder than the Ford deal. I went and found out who the decision belonged to and what they actually needed.

What to do on yours this week

Pick the one deal that has gone quiet and answer these on paper. This is the decision map in its simplest form.

  1. Where does the decision actually live? Not who signs. Who has to be comfortable before anybody signs. Write the names down. A question mark counts as an answer, and it tells you where to go next.
  2. Who is arguing against you, and what is their reason? Most of the reasons belong to the business, not the person in front of you. Ask your contact who would be happiest if this never happened.
  3. What is in your champion's hands? They are having that argument without you. Write them one page that answers the objections they will get.
  4. What is the real date? Get it from the people who need the thing, not the people passing it on. Then work backwards through your lead time and show them the last day they can order.

If you cannot answer those, the deal has not stalled. You have lost sight of it.

The short version

The man who signs is rarely the man who decides. Find the room, find who is arguing, and get the real date from the owner.

Got one that has stopped? Bring a stalled deal. Thirty minutes on one deal, no charge, and you leave knowing where it has actually stopped and the three things to do next.

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