It’s 3:17 AM. I can’t sleep.
This has become routine lately. Life stuff I won’t bore you with. But tonight my brain won’t stop circling something else entirely.
I’ve been replaying deals in my head. Not the wins – the losses. The ones that made no sense. The ones where we did everything right and still watched the buyer ghost us at the finish line.
And somewhere around 2 AM, something clicked.
The Pattern I Couldn’t See
Here’s what kept nagging at me: the deals where we pushed hardest were the deals that stalled the worst. The ones where we backed off – sometimes out of frustration, sometimes because we got distracted by other opportunities – those were the ones that came back to life.
I always explained this away. Timing. Budget cycles. Champion changes. The usual excuses.
But what if it’s not timing?
What if it’s physics?
The Thought That Won’t Let Me Sleep
Picture two magnets. Same polarity. The harder you push them together, the harder they push apart.
What if sales works the same way?
What if every time we “add value” and “stay top of mind” and “create urgency” – what if every one of those best-practice activities is actually generating an equal and opposite force?
The buyer feels pushed. So they pull away. We push harder. They pull harder.
We call it a “stalled deal.” But maybe we stalled it.
I Started Doing the Math
I pulled up my pipeline from last year. Started categorizing deals by activity level. How many touches. How many “just checking in” emails. How many “I have another client who might take this slot” pressure plays.
The correlation is disturbing.
High activity deals: 23% close rate.
Medium activity deals: 41% close rate.
Low activity deals: 62% close rate.
That can’t be right. I ran it again.
Same numbers.
What If Everything Is Backwards?
Every sales book. Every methodology. Every training. They all say the same thing in different words: do more. Push harder. Create urgency. Never let a deal go quiet.
What if that’s exactly wrong?
What if the answer isn’t more force – it’s less?
I don’t have this figured out yet. I’m sitting here at 3 AM with a half-formed thought and a spreadsheet that might be lying to me.
But I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been looking at this upside down for twenty years.
What if we all have?
—
I need to dig into this more. Run more numbers. Test it on live deals. But I wanted to write this down before the idea slips away into whatever passes for sleep these days.
More soon. If I can figure out what any of this means.
57% of Reps Miss Quota.
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