How to Stop Losing Deals to "No Decision"

One of the biggest lessons in my sales career came from someone who had nothing to do with sales.

I was 4 months into my role as Global Head of Sales Enablement at a large tech company. I’d taken 32 calls with sellers, 16 with sales leaders, and reviewed 40 discovery calls with prospects. At this point, I was confident I knew what the team was missing.

We had tons of useful information scattered across Google Drives, Confluence pages, and random Slack channels. We needed to organize it so we could give our buyers the right information at the right time in the sales cycle.

I’d done my research, and knew exactly which tool was best for our team. I’d talked it over with my boss, evaluated multiple vendors, and all that was left was to secure the budget with finance.

I confidently walked into my CFO's office with a pitch for a new enablement platform. The deck was beautiful. The ROI model was tight. At a price of $60k for a company of our size, this was a no brainer in my eyes.

Ten minutes later, I walked out of the meeting empty-handed.

Instead the budget I was looking for, our CFO left me with this feedback that I’ll never forget:

"I can see how this solves your problem. I don't see how it solves mine. Let’s revisit in 6 months and see if there’s a stronger use case."

In the blink of an eye, the project that I’d spent weeks working on was dead before it even took off. I remember feeling dejected as I had to tell my team that we weren’t going to be getting any software support for our new initiatives.

We’d have to continue to piecing together our existing tools with duct tape and super glue to make them work for our specific use case.

That's when it hit me, I didn’t lose the deal because I wasn’t prepared, I lost because I didn’t understand my audience.

I didn't know how to speak CFO. I only spoke enablement director.

Here's the thing: your champions are making this exact mistake right now, and it’s the reason your deals are falling to “no decision”.

Your deals are dying in conversations you’re not in.

You know the story. Your rep crushed discovery. They built a killer business case with the champion. Everything validated. Moves deal to commit.

Then, without you knowing, your champion walks into the finance meeting.

And gets absolutely torn apart.

Not because your product sucks. Not because the business case was weak. But because your champions don’t speak the same language as their executive team.

Directors speak product. CFOs speak resource allocation and risk.

And when they don’t know how to translate, your deal stalls out. Usually without you ever finding out why.

This is the gap I spend all my time helping sales leaders fix: getting your message from the champion level to the C-suite without it falling apart. Because you can have the best discovery process in the world, but if your champion can't translate it into terms executives care about, you're cooked.

The 8 Questions Your Champion's About to Get Hit With

After my CFO schooled me, I got obsessed with learning how executives communicate. I started interviewing finance leaders. Looked at approved vs. rejected business cases. Followed up with champions from deals our AE’s lost.

Turns out CFOs ask some variation of the same eight questions across deals. And if your champion freezes up, your deal is sitting in murky waters.

1. "Why do we need this now? We've been fine without it."

Translation: prove this isn't just a shiny object. Show me cost of inaction.

2. "What bucket is this? Growth, cost reduction, risk, or nice-to-have?"

The bucket determines everything—scrutiny level, approval threshold, who else weighs in.

3. "Don't we already have something that does this?"

The "can't we just use Salesforce?" question. If you haven't documented why current tools failed, you're done.

4. "How does this map to our board-level objectives this year?"

Is this aligned with what the CEO promised the board? Or is this a pet project?

5. "Is this budgeted? If not, what are we cutting to pay for it?"

Even in growth mode, finance thinks in trade-offs. Yes to you means no to someone else.

6. "What's the real implementation cost in people and time?"

Sticker price is just the start. What's this going to cost in engineering hours, training, productivity dip?

7. "Are we going to have to upgrade to enterprise tier in 12 months?"

They hate surprise 3x renewals. They want the full financial picture now.

8. "Walk me through your usage model. Prove we're not overbuying seats."

Whether it's usage-based or seat-based, they want realistic projections. Not your best-case fantasy.

Questions 1, 3, and 8 are the real deal killers:

• Question 1 (Why now?) — You need cost of inaction, not just upside
• Question 3 (What do we own?) — Document the failure of existing tools with examples
• Question 8 (Usage/seats) — Show realistic modeling, not wishful thinking

If your champion can't nail these three? Your deal's not ready for finance (or your forecast).

How to pressure test your deals.

Counterintuitive sales law #452:

The more you try to break your opportunities, the harder your champions will work to hold them together (if it’s real).

The best teams don't wait for finance to kill deals. They stress-test them first.

In your next deal review, have you rep pull up a key deal that’s in discovery and walk your rep through each of the 8 questions out loud. Have them rank each answer 1-5 and pull the 3 weakest answers.

Then, have them sync with their champion and work through how they can strengthen their case to the CFO.

Champion stumbles? Don't forecast it. Fix it together.

Help Your Champion Learn to Translate

Your champion's been talking features and workflows. They need to pivot to investment justification.

Help them reframe:

• "Why now" → Cost of inaction, competitive threat, regulatory pressure
• "What do we already own" → Specific examples of how current tools failed
• "Pricing model" → Usage forecast based on similar tools, not made-up headcount

Use This Move When They Say "Just Send Me Pricing"

I saw Kyle Asay coach his team to respond like this, and it's brilliant:

"Happy to send pricing—will get that over after our call. Quick thing though: when you present this to your CFO, they're probably going to ask you:

• 'Why can't we keep doing what we're doing today?'
• 'How is this better than cheaper options?'
• 'How will we measure success?'

We've made good progress on these over the last few meetings. Can we grab 30 minutes to make sure the answers are tailored to what your CFO actually cares about?"

This does three things:

1. Positions you as strategic partner, not vendor waiting for a signature
2. Surfaces gaps before the champion gets blindsided
3. Forces validation of the business case with CFO-level thinking

In a perfect world, you're in the room with the economic buyer. In reality, especially in enterprise, that meeting happens without you.

If you can't be there in person, your job is to frame the conversation so your champion's ready for it.

The Real Job

Your job isn't just to win the champion.

It's to help them win the deal.

This framework works whether you're helping a rep or pitching your own budget. (Trust me, I wish someone had walked me through this before I went into my CFO's office that day.)

Most deals don't die in discovery. They don't die in your CRM. They die in the CFO's office when your champion shows up unprepared.

But when you help your champions translate value into CFO language, when you stress-test deals before they hit finance, you don't just win more. You build champions who can sell internally long after your demo ends.

This is exactly what I help sales leaders build into their teams at Storytechr—coaching reps to develop strategic thinking so champions can navigate from discovery all the way to C-suite approval without getting torn apart.

Want to talk about what that looks like for your team? Let's grab time.