Earliest Reliable Signals That a Deal Might Be in Trouble?
Hey folks, I have a question for you - what's the earliest signal you trust that a deal might be in trouble ? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Hey folks, I have a question for you - what's the earliest signal you trust that a deal might be in trouble ? Curious to hear your thoughts.
Champion is unable / unwilling to make intros to lateral or high-up stakeholders
Hey Manuel H., this is a strong one. I’ve seen deals look “green” for weeks, but if the champion can’t (or won’t) bring in peers or execs, it’s usually a sign they don’t have enough internal pull — or the problem isn’t urgent enough. Curious — do you treat that as an immediate red flag, or do you try specific plays to unblock multi-threading before calling it risk?
Lack of multi-threading is immediate red flag / risk, unless it’s a smaller opp (i.e. sub $100k). It’s less the fact that this is happening that’s the red flag, but if a champion is unwilling to proactively widen the conversation, something is not fully aligned.
That distinction makes a lot of sense — especially tying the signal to deal size rather than treating it as a blanket rule. I like how you frame it as an alignment issue more than just an activity one. When you spot that unwillingness early, do you formally downgrade the deal, or do you have a specific checkpoint/play you run to test alignment before calling it risk?
It just raises an eyebrow and a deal moves from prospect to suspect until this can be corrected. If it can’t be corrected, the deal gets DQ’d
That’s a really clean way to frame it — treating it as a state change rather than an immediate fail. Prospect → suspect → DQ with a clear correction test in between feels like a healthy balance between discipline and patience. Appreciate you breaking that down — curious if others here use similar “suspect” states or checkpoints before disqualifying.
"The earliest signal isn't ghosting—that’s the autopsy. The earliest signal is Response Latency on 'Hard Questions.' We analyzed many calls, and dug through research after research papers, and the data shows that when a prospect answers a high-stakes question (like Budget or Timeline) with a simple answer, 'Yes' but pauses for more than 600 milliseconds before speaking, the deal probability drops by over 40%. Humans are socially conditioned to be polite ("The Polite Lie"), but our biology is terrible at hiding cognitive load. That split-second silence is their brain processing a conflict between what they want to say (No) and what they feel they should say (Yes). If you hear that awkward pause before a 'Yes,' treat it as a 'No' and dig deeper immediately. Trust the physics of their voice, not the transcript of their words."
Hey Ron S., this is a powerful distinction — “ghosting as the autopsy” really lands. The idea that hesitation on hard questions is the real early signal resonates a lot, especially framing it as cognitive load leaking through before the words do. Curious — do you train reps to explicitly treat those delayed “yeses” as a follow-up trigger, or is it something you expect experienced sellers to catch instinctively?
experienced sellers to catch this instinctively, we do post-call analysis and live voice role-play, so reps can get comfortable in those situations and become "experienced sellers." We experimented with live monitoring and coaching (bot listens and prompts), but we can prove that this disrupts natural conversational patterns (increases cognitive load specifically). Most buyers/people detect this as "something's off". I can get even more nerdy, but tend to over-teach, so I'll stop here.
That makes a lot of sense — especially the point about real-time prompting increasing cognitive load and breaking conversational flow. The “something’s off” signal from buyers is subtle but real. Framing this as a skill developed through post-call analysis and role-play rather than live intervention feels like the right tradeoff between insight and trust. Appreciate you sharing this level of detail — super thoughtful perspective.
One signal I’ve learned to trust isn’t behavioral — it’s structural. If the deal requires *new internal coordination* (legal, security, pricing exceptions, procurement) before the buyer has emotionally committed, risk is already high. At that point the deal looks “alive” in CRM, but it’s actually waiting on assumptions outside the buyer’s control. I usually watch for: • decision ownership shifting • reversibility disappearing • confidence staying high while timelines slip Curious if you’ve seen that pattern too.
This is a really sharp distinction Akhilesh w. — structural dependency risk shows up way earlier than most behavioral signals. The “new coordination before emotional commitment” point resonates, especially when approvals live outside the champion’s control and progress becomes assumed rather than owned. Curious — when you notice decision ownership shifting or timelines slipping while confidence stays high, do you explicitly re-ground the deal around a single owner, or do you treat that as a signal to slow or re-qualify?
Yes — that’s exactly the failure mode. What I keep seeing is teams treating “confidence” as reassurance, instead of as a variable that needs stress-testing. When confidence stays high *while* reversibility is dropping, that’s usually the moment worth pausing — not to renegotiate terms, but to re-surface the decision itself.
That framing is really helpful — treating confidence as something to stress-test rather than accept at face value. The combination of rising confidence and falling reversibility feels like a hidden inflection point most teams miss, especially when momentum masks the absence of an actual decision. Pausing to re-surface the decision (who’s deciding, what’s being decided, and what would invalidate it) feels like a far healthier intervention than pushing the deal forward.
Exactly — momentum is a powerful anesthetic. Once it’s doing the work, teams stop asking “what would make this a bad decision?” and start optimizing execution instead. That pause — to name the owner, the decision, and the invalidation conditions — is often the last clean moment before the path hardens.
