Ask nearly any sales leader whether her company has a defined sales process, and the answer will likely be a resounding “Yes”. Some of those processes are tightly documented with clear stages and milestones. Others are loose — more of a shared understanding than an actual written map. Either way, the purpose of the sales process is the same: give salespeople a repeatable way to prevent a stalled sales pipeline and keep more opportunities moving forward.
So, why do sales leaders who have a defined sales process still end up with a stagnant sales pipeline filled with opportunities that just won’t budge? In our work with sales organizations over the past 25 years, we’ve encountered some version of the following from nearly every one of them: “Roughly half the opportunities sitting in the pipeline are stalled. Not lost, not closed — just… stuck.”
The real question worth answering is not “Do we have a sales process?”, but “Why isn’t our sales process working?”
Sales opportunities typically stall mid-pipeline due to a few consistent reasons: (1) Salespeople skip critical steps in the process or don’t complete them thoroughly enough; (2) Salespeople complete steps out of order, or (3) Salespeople try to meet customer requests (for pricing or a proposal) that reside in an advanced stage of the sales process before fully completing the critical steps in earlier stages of the sales process.
A sales process is a recipe, not a suggestion
Consider the last time you followed a recipe, but the dish didn’t turn out as you expected. Chances are one of two things happened: (1) You skipped a step in the recipe (or did it wrong), or (2) You did something out of order — added an ingredient too early, combined things before they were ready, etc. Either mistake can change the outcome of the recipe, even if every ingredient added was technically in the recipe.
A sales process works the same way as a recipe. It’s built from a sequence of steps and milestones designed to produce a predictable, repeatable outcome. When a salesperson skips a step or jumps ahead to something that’s supposed to happen later, the process doesn’t necessarily fail loudly. It could just quietly stop working. The opportunity doesn’t necessarily disappear. It simply could stall.
That distinction between failed and stalled matters. A stalled opportunity often looks fine on paper. After all, it’s still in the pipeline, still assigned, and still “in progress.” But if the right conversation didn’t happen, or the right stakeholder wasn’t engaged, or a qualifying question got skipped in the rush to present a solution, the opportunity will quietly lose momentum. Nobody notices an opportunity is stalled until the close date slips for the third time.
The real reasons B2B deals stall: Skipped steps kill value, not just speed
There’s a second consequence that’s easy to miss when a salesperson fails to follow a well-defined sales process. Skipping steps or jumping ahead in the sales process doesn’t just slow deals down — it undermines the salesperson’s ability to build value along the way. Each stage of a well-defined sales process typically exists to accomplish a specific and important task: Uncover a real business problem, quantify its impact, build consensus among stakeholders, and differentiate a solution from alternatives. When a salesperson skips any of these steps, it opens the door for price and value objections.
As a result, stalled pipelines and heavy discounting tend to go hand-in-hand. When salespeople haven’t done the required value-building work early in the sales process, discounting becomes the only lever left to get a stuck deal moving again. A pipeline filled with stalled opportunities and a consistent over-reliance on discounting both stem from the same root problem, showing up in two different places.
Diagnosing a stalled pipeline: the one question that finds the problem
Try this simple exercise with your own team. First, ask five salespeople what specific actions or milestones need to happen for a deal to move from one stage of the sales process to the next. Not the stage name — the actual actions or milestones that need to be completed.
In our experience, if you ask five different salespeople, you’ll rarely get five consistent answers. Unfortunately, the lack of a consistent answer is the real story behind the stall. The problem is not that the process is poorly designed (although it may be), the problem is that the process isn’t being followed consistently and rigorously by everyone using it. And usually, the sales process isn’t being followed consistently and rigorously because it was never defined clearly enough, at the behavioral level, for reps to know exactly what “done” looks like at each stage.
This aligns with what we’re seeing in the sales strategy research we’ve conducted with the Sales Management Association. Organizations that clearly define what needs to happen at each stage of the pipeline see significantly fewer stalled opportunities than those organizations that leave their sales process to be loosely interpreted. The fix isn’t a new CRM field or a process overhaul. It’s making the existing sales process stages specific and behavioral enough that any salesperson, when asked cold, could tell you what it takes to move an opportunity from one stage to another.
What a well-defined sales process actually looks like
A well-defined sales pipeline process breaks down into stages, and within each stage, a set of critical milestones — the specific actions or outcomes that need to occur before an opportunity is legitimately ready to move forward. The milestones aren’t generic check boxes like “discovery call held.” They’re specific enough to be coachable: i.e., what question had to be asked? What stakeholder had to be involved? What had to be confirmed before moving on?
When a higher level of clarity exists, sales managers can actually coach to it. They can look at a stalled deal and identify exactly which milestone(s) got skipped, rather than guessing or assuming the salesperson just needs to “push harder.” That’s the difference between a process that lives on a slide and one that actually changes behavior in the field.
Where to start
You don’t need to redesign your sales process to address stalled sales pipeline and opportunities. Start smaller:
- Identify the ONE stage of your sales process that contains the highest number of “stalled” opportunities.
- Ask a handful of salespeople, independently, the following question: “What critical elements (actions, information gained, strategies executed, etc.) do you need to complete to move an opportunity from this stage of the sales process to the next?”
- Use those answers (specifically the answers that are consistent from one salesperson to the next) to get clarity on the actions your team should be taking on opportunities at that stage in the sales process.
- Have each salesperson assess each opportunity residing in that stage of the sales process and determine which action(s) need to be taken immediately to try and get some of those stalled opportunities moving again.
Sales pipelines filled with stalled opportunities rarely mean your process is broken. Far more often, the issue is that the process was never translated into specific enough terms for everyone to execute it consistently. Address the specificity issue, and the stalls (and the discounting that comes with them) will likely resolve themselves.
If your team is finding that opportunities keep getting stuck in your sales process, we’d be glad to help you figure out where and why. Reach out to us here.