What are the steps of the Third Pass on a stalled deal?
Do this on paper. Writing it down is the work, not thinking about it.
- Write your first explanation of what is happening. One sentence, the answer that comes to mind first, the one you would give a manager who stopped at your desk. Not the polished version.
- Write “and then what?” underneath it.
- Write a second explanation. To get past the first you have to be willing to disrespect it. It has to put you inside the deal.
- Write “and then what?” underneath that.
- Write a third explanation. The first pass is the lazy one, the second is closer, and the third is usually where the work begins. It is the explanation you would not have given without being asked twice more.
The same steps work on a deal that is won, lost or stuck. Run on a stuck deal, they give the next conversation with your manager an explanation you can act on instead of a word you can only wait out.
What counts as evidence when you run it?
Lazy words are not wrong. Each points at something real. The problem is when the sentence ends on the word. Inside “timing” is the mechanism of when in a buyer’s quarter you raise a particular question, and why. Inside “instinct” are signals you registered without registering. Use these as the raw material for your second and third explanations:
- 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?
Write the answers into the second and third explanations.
Can you tell if a stalled deal is dead?
Not reliably from the deal alone, and asking about the deal first skips the explanation you are already giving yourself. A weekly pipeline meeting is built to ask deal-level questions: where is this deal, what is the next step, why did this slip. It is not built to ask what is underneath the first explanation you gave. If the first explanation is “timing”, the deal-level answer to “is it dead?” is a guess made from a word.
The honest limit: no test on this page can declare a stalled deal dead, and the page will not invent one. There is no checklist, no buyer-behavior timeline and no statistic here, because each would have to be made up. The better first step is to read your own explanation and check what it rests on. Then decide.
What does the Third Pass look like on a real deal?
A seller joined a large food processor opportunity in Southern California after the local rep opened it. Discovery was clean, and the seller’s company had real-time tracking that fit the owner’s pain. It was new and not yet running in his region, and the owner had not been told. Three weeks after the facility tour the account stayed with the incumbent.
- First pass: The seller’s first explanation blamed cold feet, the incumbent’s concessions and a cautious buyer. None of it held up: the owner had been emphatic about the pain.
- Second pass: The seller had sold a technology not yet deployed in the owner’s region and had not flagged that in discovery, when flagging it was cheap.
- Third pass: The seller never asked, in the first meeting, whether the owner would be willing to be the first in his region to use it, because in the seller’s head the technology was already installed.
- Behavior to refine: ask the customer what the deal looks like from their seat before telling them what it looks like from yours.
This one was run after the loss. The steps are identical while a deal is still stuck, which is the point of running them early.
Where does this fit next to deal inspection?
Deal inspection tests whether the claims a deal rests on are backed by evidence. The Third Pass tests the explanation the seller is giving for why the deal is not moving. One checks the deal’s claims, the other checks your own account of it.