A deal stops moving and the first instinct is to look at your own work. Send a better case study. Sharpen the price. Try a different subject line. I have watched good sellers spend three weeks improving a pitch that was never the problem, while the real blocker sat two desks from their contact and never got mentioned.
Gartner surveyed 632 B2B buyers in August and September 2024 and found that 74 percent of buyer teams show unhealthy conflict while they decide. Three quarters. Most deals are not sitting still because your proposal was thin. They are sitting still because a group of five to sixteen people, across as many as four functions, cannot agree, and nobody has told you.
This is a different question from getting one big silent deal talking again, which I covered in what to do when a big deal goes quiet. That piece is about reopening a deal you cannot afford to lose. This one is the diagnosis you do first, on any deal: whose problem is the stall?
Four stalls that look identical from the outside
In your CRM they all read the same way. Last activity, nineteen days ago. They are not the same stall, and the fix for one of them makes the other three worse.
It is your problem. They want to buy. You have not given them what they need to sell it internally: a number they can quote, a one-page version for the people who were never in the room, an answer to the question their finance lead will ask.
It is their problem. The buying group has not reached agreement. Someone with a quiet veto has not been handled, or a new person has joined and is re-asking questions you settled in July.
It is nobody's problem yet. The pain is real, and it lost. An outage, an audit or a resignation took the budget and the attention. Nothing is wrong with your deal except its place in the queue.
It was never a deal. You were research. Someone needed three quotes, a market view, or a number for a board paper, and you supplied it.
How do you tell which one you are in?
You ask, and you make the question cheap to answer. Not "just following up", which asks them to produce a decision they do not have. Something closer to: when we last spoke this was a priority, and I am guessing something has changed. What is it?
Then read what the reply costs them, not whether it arrives. A fast, detailed, slightly apologetic reply usually means it is your problem: they are still selling it inside and have run out of ammunition. A vague reply, or a new name appearing on the thread, points at their problem. An honest "we have had to push this to the new year" is nobody's problem yet, and it is the most useful answer you will get. Silence from someone who never asked about implementation, contract terms or how the pricing actually works was probably never a deal.
What to do in each case
Your problem: stop sending sales documents and send an internal one. One page, in their language, with the number and how you worked it out, and make it something your contact can forward without editing.
Their problem: stop selling to your contact and start helping them run their own meeting. Ask who is not convinced and why. Answer that objection in writing, so your champion is not defending it from memory in a room you are not in. Gartner found buying groups who reach consensus are two and a half times more likely to say the deal was high quality, so helping them agree is not a favour. It is the work.
Nobody's problem yet: agree a date and take it off the pipeline. A deal parked honestly is worth more than a deal carried at 40 percent for a quarter, because you stop lying to yourself about the forecast.
Never a deal: close it lost, and write down what question they were really answering. That note is worth more than the deal was.
Why the diagnosis matters more here
New Zealand is small enough that the same buyers come round again, at a different company, two years later. How you behave while a deal is stalled is remembered longer than how you pitched. The seller who chased weekly is remembered as the one who chased weekly.
The other reason is capacity. A five-person company cannot spend three weeks aimed at the wrong side of the table. The diagnosis is not politeness, it is the cheapest thing you can do.
The one move that makes every stall worse
Chasing. A weekly check-in with nothing new in it forces a decision the buyer does not have the agreement to make, and the cheapest decision under pressure is no. It also tells them you have nothing to add.
So before you send the next one: whose problem are you actually solving?
Is the stall in your pipeline yours to fix?
In about 6 minutes, the free Growth Scorecard shows where your sales are leaking and what to fix first.
Get your free scorecardSources. Buying group conflict, size and consensus: Gartner, "Gartner Sales Survey Finds 74% of B2B Buyer Teams Demonstrate 'Unhealthy Conflict' During The Decision Process", press release, 7 May 2025, reporting a survey of 632 B2B buyers conducted in August and September 2024. That release carries the 74 percent conflict figure, the finding that buying groups which reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report their deal was high quality, and the description of buying groups "ranging from five to 16 people across as many as four functions", attributed to Delainey Kirkwood, Principal, Research, in Gartner's Sales Practice. "Three quarters" in the opening is 74 percent rounded to the nearest quarter, and "two and a half times" is the 2.5 figure written out. Gartner published no margin of error or geographic breakdown with that release, and no respondent is identified as a New Zealand buyer, so I use it as direction on how buying groups behave rather than as a measurement of this market. One figure was considered and cut: the often-repeated claim that most forecast B2B deals end in no decision rather than a loss to a competitor runs through dozens of secondary summaries without a primary source I could trace, so it is not in this article. The four-stall split, the wording of the re-engagement question, the reply-cost test, the advice on parking a deal and the point about a small market remembering how you behaved all come from my own work with New Zealand tech founders rather than from published data.