Great meeting. No reply.

What killed your deal while you were celebrating.

The meeting went well. Then nothing happened.

Early in my career, I ran a digital consultancy. We pitched for a large tender with an international company. Two meetings. They loved us. Loved our ideas, our approach, our strategy. The vibe in the room was electric. We were already spending the money in our heads.

A week later, we found out we didn’t get the work.

When I asked why, they told me, they loved what we did. They loved our strategy. But they worried we were too small. Too young. Might not be around long enough to support them. Might not have the experience to handle the challenges of an account their size.

Every one of those concerns could have been addressed in the room. But we never got the chance. The meetings were going so well, we didn’t think we needed to.

The decision happened somewhere else.

This is the part that sales books skip over. The part between “great meeting” and “closed deal.” Most founders obsess over the pitch. The demo. The deck. What happens in the room where they’re presenting.

But most complex deals don’t die in that room.

They die in the meeting you’re not in. The one where your champion has to explain to their boss, or their boss’s boss, why they’re recommending you. The one where someone asks a question your champion can’t answer. The one where the person who could kill it quietly decides to stay silent instead of speak up.

Gartner found that 74% of B2B buying teams experience “unhealthy conflict” during decisions. That’s conflicting objectives, disagreements about the best path forward, people getting overruled by decision-makers who weren’t even in your meeting. Three quarters of all buying committees. Not the exceptions. The norm.

(I wrote about why trust networks matter more than funnels here, this is what happens after you've built that trust and still lose.)

And here’s the part that stings. 51% of customers who are willing to buy are not willing to advocate for you internally. Liking you is free. Fighting for you costs political capital.

Half of your champions won’t fight for you. They like you and they want you to win. But when the room gets heated, they stay quiet.

I’ve been on the other side of this too.

At one company, I was building a digital arm inside a traditional business. The tech stack was legacy. Really old. I wanted to move to cloud-based tools. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, Mutiny. Tools that would let us do sophisticated lead generation, data analysis, proper funnel optimization.

The IT team wanted to keep the non-cloud version of Salesforce. It was next to impossible to integrate any third party tools with. Hard to get the data we needed. But it was what they knew. They had vested interests. They wanted to keep doing things the way they’d always done them. They didn’t want extra work.

To change anything, I needed CEO level approval. And I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. The company wanted results on day one. Showing results on day two. But the strategic work of upgrading the stack needed time. Time I didn’t have. Political capital I hadn’t built.

In hindsight, I should have been more aggressive. More persuasive in showing the benefit of migrating faster. But I was the champion for those tools, and I couldn’t close the internal sale. Many of the third-party vendors I was speaking to couldn’t understand why. It’s hard to understand unless you’re on the inside.

That’s what it feels like to be your own champion who can’t sell internally. And if you’re selling to enterprises, that’s what your champion feels like too.

Here’s what most people get wrong about champions.

A champion who "loves your product" and a champion who'll risk their neck for it are two very different people.

Champions don’t fight for you. They fight for themselves. They need to believe that getting you on board is in their best interest. That your solution protects their job. Advances their career. Makes them look smart.

It’s not charity. It’s not about how much they liked your demo.

They need to believe: “If I don’t get this vendor, my job is at risk.”

That’s a much higher bar than “I think these folks are great.”

Matthew Dixon’s work on the “JOLT Effect” found that 40-60% of B2B deals end in no decision. Not lost to a competitor. Just... nothing. The deal slowly dies.

And only 44% of those no-decisions are because the buyer prefers the status quo. The other 56%? Indecision. Fear. The buyer wants to change, but can’t pull the trigger.

They’re not scared of missing out. Nobody ever got promoted for taking a risk that worked. But plenty got fired for one that didn't.

So the safe choice is no choice. The path of least resistance is silence.

Your deal dies in a meeting you never saw. Killed by a fear story you never addressed. Defended by a champion who didn’t have the ammunition to fight.

These are the questions I ask myself now before I leave the room:

Can they repeat what you do?

In one sentence. Without jargon.

If your champion can’t explain it clearly, they won’t try.

Do they have proof they can point to?

Not your deck. Something they can show someone else.

A case study. A specific result.

Can they answer the fear question?

When someone asks “What happens if this goes wrong?” what does your champion say? If you don’t know, they don’t either.

Do they know who else needs to agree?

And what those people care about? The decision rarely rests with the person you pitched. Who’s in the room you’re not in?

The deal closes somewhere else. With people you’ve never met and based on conversations you’ll never hear.

The question isn’t whether you won the meeting.

It’s whether you armed your champion to win the one meeting you’re not in.

See you out there.

Martin

P.S.

If you've had a deal go dark after a great meeting, tell me what you think went wrong. I'm collecting autopsy reports.

My writing soundtrack “End of the Beginning“ by Djo.