Production and supply chain planners constantly face forecast uncertainty. A project surfaces in the CRM forecast, and the way it is described normally looks something like: “Looking Good. 8/31 close. They like our solution and said our quote is in line with their expectations. 85% likelihood.”
“Should we plan for production capacity?” they wonder. Maybe, but often, forecasts are unreliable. So they hedge, run capacity scenarios and adjust order amounts — skeptically.
But on the prospect’s side, their engineering and procurement teams see things very differently. They’ve been researching options for months. A short list was prepared before any vendors were contacted. A preferred vendor already tops the list. Purchasing required three vendors and this rep obliged. Nice person. Good company. Decent service and solution. But nothing that changes their mind.
And so the order never materializes. The rep didn’t lose the deal. The rep was never competing.
This is not an occasional frustration. It’s a structural feature of how industrial buying decisions are made, and how industrial sales teams stumble routinely. It also explains a pattern that most sales leaders would rather not confront.
6sense’s research tracking over 4,000 B2B buyers found that 94% of buying teams rank their vendor short list in order of preference before they ever initiate contact with sellers, and 95% of purchases ultimately go to a vendor that was on that initial list. The vendor ranked first wins roughly 80% of the time. By the time your rep gets that inquiry call, the buyer is somewhere between 57% and 70% through their decision process, and they already know who they’d prefer to buy from.
The traditional response to this is to invest in more marketing, more leads, more pipeline. That’s the wrong answer. The question isn’t volume. It’s timing, or more accurately, origin and savvy.
When the Real Decisions Happen
Here’s what makes this particularly hard to fix: an important industrial procurement process (one with significant implications for a mistake) doesn’t involve one decision. It involves five, and they happen in sequence — most of them without any sales involvement at all.
It starts when someone internally commits the time and resources to seriously evaluate whether a change is even worth pursuing. Then, a business case must be built and a capital or change case submitted. Then, finance or senior leadership has to approve funding or the change. Only after clearing those three hurdles does a buying committee turn its attention to evaluating vendors, and then, finally, to selecting one.
Most industrial sales reps enter the conversation at step four or five when they either receive an inquiry, or “prospecting” uncovers an active project. They meet with technical evaluators, walk through specs, discuss lead times and price. Those conversations matter, but they’re happening after the foundational decisions have already been made (or not), largely without the rep in the room. Decisions two and three – whether a project gets funded and approved – often happen with no supplier visibility at all. By the time a formal RFQ goes out, the buyer isn’t really evaluating. They’re confirming.
The companies whose reps are present and useful earlier in that sequence have a structural advantage that no amount of polished late-stage pitching, or corrosive discounting, can close.
The No-Decision Problem Nobody Talks About
Even in the deals that do get to vendor evaluation, a significant percentage never close — and this isn’t because a competitor wins, it is because the buyer decides not to decide.
DCM Insights analyzed 2.5 million recorded B2B sales conversations for their research published as The JOLT Effect. The finding that most sales organizations haven’t internalized is that 40-60% of deals end in no decision. Not lost to a competitor; just evaporated. And in conversations where buyer indecision is running high, win rates fall to 6%. Clearly, this tells us that they weren’t qualified opportunities — they were more like fiber fill in the pipeline.
For production planners and operations teams waiting on planned orders to materialize, a stalled purchase leads to noticeable schedule, overcapacity and cost problems. When that much of what the sales team had forecasted simply evaporates, planning becomes a guessing game. The research also found that 87% of sales conversations carry medium to high levels of buyer indecision. In our experience, this kind of indecision is really what becomes the default condition in complex industrial purchases.
Why Urgency Tactics Make It Worse
The conventional response to a stalling deal is to apply pressure. Create urgency by returning to FOMO. Remind the buyer what they’re missing out on. This turns out to be exactly the wrong move.
DCM found that only 44% of no-decision losses reflect a genuine preference for the status quo. The remaining 56% are driven by something researchers call FOMU (Fear of Messing Up). The buyer isn’t indifferent, but rather paralyzed. Someone on the buying committee is worried about their credibility if the project underperforms. Finance is skeptical of the ROI assumptions. Engineering is uncertain about integration. The person who championed the project internally has a reputation on the line.
Gartner’s 2025 research found that 74% of B2B buying groups experience “unhealthy conflict” during the decision process, across committees that now routinely include between eight and 13 stakeholders. That’s not a room full of people eager to be convinced by a sales pitch; that’s a room full of people managing personal and organizational risk, with their departmental and private priorities often in conflict.
Piling on urgency in that environment doesn’t accelerate the decision, rather, it gives risk-averse stakeholders more reasons to wait. “Too busy” is an easy reflex.
What Actually Changes Outcomes
The rep who can show up in the first and second stage of the buying process, when the business case is being shaped and the capital request is being drafted, isn’t just another vendor. They become a partner in building the justification for the project itself, particularly when they help create the initial project by seeding the conversation with an insight and a creative idea. That’s a fundamentally different relationship than the one that starts with an inquiry call.
This requires a different kind of capability. A rep who can help an operations manager quantify the cost of the current problem and frame it in language that finance will actually fund. Someone who understands capital approval processes well enough to help a champion navigate them, and can meet with the CFO and board when appropriate. Someone who can read a committee dynamic and recognize when fear is the real obstacle, not specifications.
RAIN Group’s analysis is instructive on the revenue impact. In their model, moving the win rate from 25% to 30% (a 5 or 20% improvement, depending on your perspective) produces approximately a 20% lift in top-line revenue, with fixed selling costs unchanged. The leverage comes from spreading the same overhead across a larger revenue base. A modest improvement in how deals are managed produces a disproportionate gain in output.
Qualifying What Actually Matters
Most qualification frameworks – BANT, MEDDIC and their variants – are built around vendor selection criteria like budget, authority, need and timeline, etc. Those questions are normally quantitative, and useful, but they’re generally stage-four and five questions. They tell you nothing about where the buyer actually is in their internal process.
Effective qualification in complex industrial sales means understanding qualitatively where a prospect stands across all five stages of their internal decision sequence. Is there organizational alignment? Has a capital request been drafted? Has finance engaged, or is the ops team working without a budget commitment? How many stakeholders are involved, and is there consensus among them?
These aren’t soft questions. They’re the difference between a real opportunity and a pipeline project that’s always just a month or quarter away from a sure-fire close. AI-assisted conversation tools are now capable of flagging indecision signals early, identifying the deals that look healthy on the surface but are quietly stalling before they consume another quarter of pipeline capacity.
The sales organizations that will win disproportionately in industrial markets over the next several years will be the ones that learned to create projects before the short list was built, and to navigate the real personalities, priorities, conflicts and decisions that determine whether a project ever happens at all.
Ed Marsh is an independent board director, NACD Governance Fellow, and founder of Ed Marsh Consulting, which helps private equity sponsors and industrial manufacturers drive organic revenue growth. He hosts the Industrial Growth Institute Podcast and writes at edmarshconsulting.com.
This column originally appeared in the July/August issue of Industrial Distribution magazine. Subscribe here and sign up for ID’s Today in Industrial Distribution daily newsletter here.
