The call goes well. They ask good questions, they can see where it fits, and then near the end: "Love it. Let's look at it properly after the next release." You write down the date, move the deal to next quarter, and tell yourself it is still alive. It might be. But what you heard had almost nothing to do with their release.
It is the most polite stall in B2B software, and it works because it sounds like a scheduling problem rather than a sales one. There is a real engineering calendar with a real date on it, and you cannot argue with a calendar. So you wait.
The date is real. The reason is not.
Their release is real, so believe the date. But "after the next release" is not a statement about time. It is a statement about priority.
What your buyer is telling you is that your problem does not currently outrank the release in the queue for their attention, their budget and their nerve. Priority is something you can work on. Their sprint calendar is not.
Most of these deals are not lost to a competitor
Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna studied more than 2.5 million recorded B2B sales conversations for The JOLT Effect. They found that 40 to 60 percent of deals in a typical pipeline end in no decision at all. The buyer does not choose you, and does not choose anyone else either.
What sits underneath is the useful part. Of those, 44 percent went to a preference for the status quo and 56 percent went to indecision - the buyer wanted to change and could not get past the risk of getting it wrong. In most of these losses the buyer was on your side. They just could not carry being the person who chose.
Why does this land so hard on New Zealand founders?
Because here, the people shipping the release and the people who would run your implementation are usually the same four people.
Stats NZ counts 612,417 businesses in New Zealand, and 97 percent of them have fewer than 20 employees. Add the two larger size bands together and only about 17,800 businesses in the whole country employ 20 or more people. The buyer telling you to wait is often describing a team you could fit around one table.
The constraint is real in a way it would not be with bigger buyers, so it should change your tone, not your answer. You are asking a small team to spend its scarcest asset, attention, on you instead of on the thing already in flight.
The two answers that make it worse
The first is to accept the date and forecast on it. Your quarter now depends on a delivery schedule inside somebody else's business - a roadmap you do not control, cannot see, and will not be told about when it slips. Their release moves, and yours moves with it. That is how a pipeline stops being a forecast.
The second is to answer with your own roadmap. The buyer goes quiet, so you offer something to keep it warm: that integration will be ready by then, that gap closes in the next version. Now you have promised something on behalf of a product team who never agreed to it, and handed the buyer a fresh reason to wait - this time for your release.
Both answers do the same thing. They swap a decision for a date.
Three things to say instead
You have less room than you think. Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey found buyers spend only 17 percent of their total purchase time meeting suppliers at all, and 5 or 6 percent with any one supplier when weighing up several. You will not out-wait that.
- Ask what changes. "When the release ships, what will be true that is not true today?" A real reason has an answer - the team frees up, the new budget year starts, the platform is finally stable enough to integrate with. A stall does not, and you will hear the difference in seconds.
- Put a number on the waiting. Not your number, theirs. If the problem costs them something each month, three months of waiting has a price. That is not pressure - it is the sentence they need to defend the spend to somebody else.
- Book the decision, not the follow-up. "Shall we put 30 minutes in for the week after the release, with whoever needs to sign it off?" If they book it, the deal is real and the date has a decision attached. If they will not, you have learned something worth more than the date.
None of that is clever, and none of it is pushy. It moves the conversation off their calendar and back onto priority, which is the only part you can influence. Do it once and you rescue a deal. Build it into how you qualify and you have a revenue engine rather than a diary.
So open the deal you have parked behind somebody else's release. Do you know what will be true after it ships that is not true today, or are you just holding a date?
Is your pipeline full of deals, or full of dates?
My free Growth Scorecard takes about 6 minutes and scores seven dimensions of your revenue engine, from positioning to pipeline to process, then names your weakest link and the first thing to fix. If you want the full diagnosis and a sequenced plan, the Growth Roadmap is the step after it.
Get your free scorecard → See how we could work together →Sources. No-decision losses, and the split between status quo and indecision: an analysis of more than 2.5 million recorded B2B sales conversations found that 40 to 60 percent of deals end in no decision, and that of those, 44 percent were lost to a customer preference for the status quo while 56 percent were lost to customer indecision (Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, Portfolio, 2022; jolteffect.com). New Zealand business sizes: Stats NZ business demography data, published by MBIE at business.govt.nz, counts 612,417 businesses in New Zealand of which 97 percent have fewer than 20 employees. The 20-49 employee band holds 11,484 businesses and the 50-or-more band holds 6,360, so 11,484 + 6,360 = 17,844 businesses employ 20 or more people (business.govt.nz, "Data for business", in association with Stats NZ). Buyer time with suppliers: buyers spend 17 percent of their total purchase time meeting with potential suppliers, and 5 to 6 percent with any one supplier when comparing several (Gartner, The B2B Buying Journey, gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey). What I left out: there are widely quoted figures on deal slippage, claiming a deal that pushes a quarter is far less likely to ever close. I could not trace any of them to a published primary study rather than a vendor blog, so I have not used them. My own observation: the three questions, and the New Zealand framing, come from my own deal reviews with NZ tech founders rather than from published data.