Cold feet is not a reason.

Three weeks later, they stayed with the incumbent.

I want to tell you about that deal, because the explanation I reached for first is one you have probably reached for too.

It was a large food processor in Southern California. The local rep had opened it. The deal heated up faster than we expected, our usual large-account business development reps were both occupied with other accounts, and I flew out to join. The discovery went the way good discovery goes. The pain came out clean. The owner wanted to know where all of his product was, at all times. He was being charged for missing items he had no way of confirming were actually missing.

We had a piece of technology that did exactly that. Real-time tracking. New to the market. Not yet operational in his region.

I jumped into sales mode. He got excited because I was excited. Then came the tour, and the first thing he asked was to see the technology in operation. He had assumed we were running it on customers in his region. We were not. He would be the first in the area, and I had not told him.

Three weeks later, they stayed with the incumbent. I called to ask why. He said he had loved the technology. He had not wanted to be the guinea pig. He felt he had been sold on a story, not a reality, and he told me to come back when we had it put together.

My first explanation was already waiting. They got cold feet. The incumbent threw in concessions. He was always going to play it safe.

It sounded complete. It was also protecting me from looking at my own work. None of it held up.

When I first wrote about this deal, in June, I said the incumbent matched our program. It was true. It was also my first pass.

Why do we keep calling stalled deals by the wrong name?

Because the wrong names are comfortable, and they end the conversation.

Relationship. Chemistry. Instinct. Timing. Territory. Five words, and I have used every one of them to explain a deal. They are not bad words. Each points at something real. The trouble is what we do with them: we finish our sentence there. Cold feet belongs on that list, next to procurement, bad timing and personality. I call the whole set the lazy vocabulary, the words a rep reaches for when they do not know what actually happened on a deal.

A stalled deal makes it worse. A deal in flight still has an ending nobody has written, so the first explanation does more than describe it. It decides your next move. If the answer is cold feet, the move is to wait, or push, or discount. Every one of those moves is aimed at the buyer. None of them is aimed at anything you did.

The fix is the Third Pass: writing your explanation of a stalled sales deal three times, with and then what? between each, until the third one names something you did.

I want to be straight about its limits. The Third Pass does not tell you whether a stalled deal is dead. I have no test for that, and I will not invent one. What it gives you is a better first question than is it dead. The question is: what is my explanation, and what is underneath it?

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, 2015

They wrote about leading SEAL teams, not about selling. The line travels anyway. Cold feet puts the cause inside the buyer. The incumbent’s concessions put it inside a competitor. Every word on the lazy list puts it somewhere a rep cannot reach, and a cause you cannot reach is a cause you cannot change.

1. Write the first explanation in one sentence.

The one that sounds most natural. The one you would say to your manager if they walked by. Do not polish it. Mine came out in three short sentences: They got cold feet. The incumbent threw in concessions. He was always going to play it safe.

2. Write and then what? underneath it, then write the second explanation.

To get past the first pass you have to be willing to disrespect it. The second explanation has to put you in the deal. Mine did: I sold him a technology I had not deployed in his region, and I did not flag it in the discovery, when flagging it was cheap. By the tour it was no longer cheap. It was a surprise. True, and closer. Still not the whole truth.

3. Ask it once more, and write a third.

The third pass is usually where the work begins. Mine went underneath the tour, back to the first meeting. When he described the pain and I recognized that we had the tool for it, I should have asked whether he would be willing to be the first in his region to use the technology. I did not ask, because I did not see it as a question. In my head, the technology was already installed. I was looking at the deal from a vantage point he had never been given.

4. End on a behavior you can run next time.

One sentence. Mine: ask the customer what the deal looks like from their seat before I tell them what it looks like from mine. That sentence travels to the next deal. Cold feet did not travel anywhere.

What the forecast call asks for.

The weekly meeting asks for an updated close date and a reason a deal slipped. It asks why did this slip. It does not ask what is the third explanation underneath the first one I gave. That is not a flaw in the meeting. The meeting’s job is the forecast. The third explanation is yours to do.

Thirty-plus years carrying a number, and the explanation that arrives first on a stalled deal has hardly changed in that time. Run the Third Pass on the one deal that scares you and it is a spike. Run it on every stuck deal, the same way, on a schedule nobody has to remember, and it is a system.

Run this.

The Third Pass, run on a deal that is stuck right now. One deal. One sheet of paper. The writing-down is the work, not the thinking about it.

1. Step 1. Write your first explanation of what is happening, in one sentence. The one that sounds most natural, the one you would say to your manager if they walked by. Do not polish it.
2. Step 2. Write and then what? underneath it, then write a second explanation. The second one has to put you in the deal: something you did, or something you did not do.
3. Step 3. Write and then what? again, then write a third. The third pass is the explanation you would not have given without being asked twice more.
4. Step 4. Use what you can point to as the raw material for the second and third. What did the buyer’s last email actually say? What was the cadence of their replies? What was the third question they asked you? What was the fourth thing on the list that they did not ask about? What was the silence in the meeting that you registered without registering?
5. Step 5. Write the behavior in one sentence. The thing you can run on the next call.

What it changes.

1. Time. The forecast call gets a reason you can act on in place of timing or cold feet. And a deal still in flight may still have a cheap question left to ask. Mine was cheap in the first meeting and a surprise by the tour.
2. Opportunity. A named behavior can be repeated on every deal after this one. A closed black box cannot.
3. Compensation. A rep who stops at cold feet keeps the behavior that produced the stall, so the next deal stalls the same way and the number stays where it was. A rep who writes the third pass has changed something that shows up on every deal after it.

The short version.

1. A stalled deal gets explained in the lazy vocabulary first: cold feet, timing, personality. Each one puts the cause somewhere you cannot reach.
2. The Third Pass is writing your explanation of a stalled sales deal three times, with and then what? between each, until the third names something you did.
3. I do not trust any test that declares a stalled deal dead before you have looked at your own explanation. The first question that earns its keep is what is my explanation, and what is underneath it?
4. End on one behavior you can run on the next call. Mine: ask the customer what the deal looks like from their seat before I tell them what it looks like from mine.

What is the explanation you hear most often when a deal stalls, and what is usually underneath it?

This essay ran as edition 19 of Frontline to Forecast, the weekly newsletter. One issue a week, published here on the Friday, then emailed and posted to LinkedIn the same morning. Same piece everywhere. Get the next one. Disagree with it? Reply to any issue, or find me on LinkedIn.