Saw an interesting pattern while interviewing sales leaders this week: A lot of “lost deals” weren’t actually lost because of budget or competition — they were lost because the team discovered the risk too late. Curious — in your team, what signals usually show up before a deal silently goes dark? 👀
This prompts an important question: What early signals do sales teams notice before an opportunity goes dark? Common indicators I've seen often overlooked include: :: changes in communication frequency, :: shifts in decision-maker involvement, or :: sudden hesitations on previously agreed terms.
Marylou Tyler This list is practically the 'vital signs' monitor for any deal. You hit on the hardest part: detecting the gradual shift. Humans are terrible at noticing when "communication frequency" drops by 20% week-over-week, but that's exactly where the deal starts dying. By the time it's silent, it's too late. We are actually coding 'Frequency Delta' and 'Decision-Maker Participation Score' as the core metrics of our engine right now to catch exactly these shifts. Curious — in your framework, do you weight 'frequency drop' or 'DM silence' higher as an immediate kill signal?
Depends on the application but I do allow a weighting table that’s adjusted once we’ve got enough data for statistical relevancy. In competitive situations, losing control of the conversation is weighted higher (silence) than say latency. We also have seasonal indicators (bank holidays in Europe are especially tricky) so the algorithm doesn’t falsely report.
