Observations
Why Do Deals Drag On, Even If the Product Is Great?
Every Chief Commercial Officer has a deal like this in their pipeline. The “perfect” one. The client matches your ideal customer profile perfectly, your product is critically important to them, and the sales manager has built an excellent relationship with the main contact.
At every sales meeting, you hear, “They love it. They’re about to make a decision.” A month passes, then a quarter. The forecast is burning. Yet the deal remains stuck at the “decision-making” stage, frozen and not moving forward.
The first reaction is to find someone to blame. Either the manager is “not pushing hard enough,” or the client is “leading us on.” But what if neither is true?
What if your product is truly exceptional and your salesperson is highly professional, yet the deal is being slowed down by “invisible” internal barriers within the client’s company? Barriers that even the strongest sales manager cannot overcome alone.
In this article, we will take a behind-the-scenes look at B2B sales and break down the three main “invisible deal killers” that cause your pipeline to stall. Most importantly, we will demonstrate how systematic collaboration between marketing and sales can help remove these barriers.
Deal Killer #1: Your “Champion” Is Not the Buyer
This is the most common and dangerous pitfall in complex B2B sales. Your sales manager finds the perfect internal ally inside the client’s company. Let’s call this person a “champion.” This could be a department head or a leading specialist who is most affected by the problem that your product solves. They like your solution, help navigate internal obstacles, and act as your internal advocate.
The problem is that, in nine out of ten cases, this person is not the economic decision maker (EDM). They may want your product, but they can’t buy it. They don’t control the budget. They cannot provide the final signature. The sales manager spends months nurturing the champion and receives lots of positive feedback. The manager gains confidence that the deal is almost won, but nothing moves forward. Why? Because, at the same time, the champion is running their own internal sales process with their CFO or CEO—and usually losing. They lack sales skills and can’t justify ROI or answer tough budget questions.
What should you do? First, map all stakeholders early and aim to reach the economic decision maker. Second, systematic collaboration plays a key role in helping the champion sell the idea internally.
This is where marketing should step in to support sales. Rather than leaving the champion on their own, marketing should provide them with an “internal seller enablement package”: a clear executive presentation, a ready-made email template for their boss, an ROI calculator that visually demonstrates financial value, and case studies from similar companies in their industry.
Don’t sell only to your champion. Start selling with them, and you will see deals that were stuck start moving forward.
Deal Killer #2: The Invisible Buying Committee
All right, you’ve solved the first problem. You’ve reached the economic decision-maker and secured his support. It seems that victory is near. But then, a second, even more dangerous opponent enters the game: the “invisible purchasing committee.”
In any large B2B deal, decisions are never made by one person, not even the CEO. The final “yes” is the result of consensus among multiple stakeholders, each with their own goals, fears, and evaluation criteria. There’s the finance leader who only cares about ROI. There’s the head of IT or the security team who sees your product as a potential system vulnerability. There’s also the legal officer who will scrutinize every line of the contract.
Your sales manager may not even know these people exist until the eleventh hour. Then, just before signing, the deal gets blocked because “security didn’t approve it” or “finance doesn’t see the value.” The deal enters a long approval cycle that may take months and often never recovers.
How do you fight invisible enemies? Make them visible and work with them proactively. This is the perfect job for marketing and sales alignment, especially within an account-based marketing (ABM) approach. Once the target account is identified, marketing should create content aimed at each member of the “committee.” For the CFO, for example, it could be a clear and convincing ROI calculator. For IT, create a detailed white paper on data security and integration protocols. For the legal team, create a pre-built FAQ covering the most common contract concerns.
As a result, when your sales manager meets with them, they will already be “warmed up,” their fears will have been addressed, and their objections will have been handled in advance. Rather than fighting objections alone at the final stage, you can prevent them systematically at the earliest stages.
Deal Killer #3: The Comfort of the Status Quo
You passed the champion. You prepared the committee. Everything seems ready. But now you face your strongest enemy. It’s not your competitor. It’s the status quo.
Even if the client agrees that your product is better than their current solution, that is often still not enough. Why? Because every purchase means change. Every change means effort, stress, and risk. It’s easier and safer to keep everything as it is, even if it’s not ideal.
As a result, the deal ends up in the “purgatory of postponed decisions.” You hear: “Great idea, but let’s revisit this next quarter,” or “We have other priorities right now.” That “later” never comes.
How do you fight it? You must shift your offer’s focus from “product advantages” to “the cost of inaction.” Your key argument shouldn’t sound like: “Our product will help you earn more,” but rather: “Every month without our product, you lose X rubles due to problem Y.”
This is a joint task for marketing and sales. Marketing must create tools that demonstrate this. These tools could include ROI calculators, industry research showing real financial losses due to inefficiency, and case studies focused not on features, but on “millions saved.” Once clients see that their comfortable “inaction” actually costs them real money every day, they will be motivated to change quickly.
From “Selling the Product” to “Managing Change”
All these problems — a champion who cannot buy, an invisible committee, and the sticky swamp of the status quo — have the same root cause. They prove that modern B2B sales is not just about selling products; it’s about helping clients manage complex internal processes of organizational change.
A salesperson cannot just be a “seller.” They must also be consultants and project managers. Marketing cannot just be a “lead generator.” It must also become an analytical and content hub that provides sales with the necessary data and tools for every step of this complex process. Do you see these deal killers in your own stalled CRM deals?
