The Real Cost of Accepting “Do Nothing”
The Real Cost of Accepting “Do Nothing”
Not only is doing nothing an action, the acceptance of “do nothing” is, in itself, an action—a choice to settle for less than our best. When we simply move on to the next deal without digging into why a prospect chose inaction, we miss a crucial opportunity to learn and improve. We continue to make the same mistakes, and we let valuable insights slip through our fingers.
Worse, this mindset is detrimental—not just to our own growth and success, but also to the growth and success of our organization. By tolerating “do nothing” outcomes, we’re doing something: we’re allowing mediocrity to take root.
For years, both as an individual contributor and as a sales leader, I found myself reluctantly accepting “do nothing” as a viable outcome for deals. It was frustrating—no matter how hard my teams or I worked, a significant number of opportunities seemed to stall out and ultimately go nowhere. Over years we allowed this to become an unavoidable part of the sales process.
Is this truly an acceptable outcome for a prospect? Is it even a true reflection of what’s happening with your prospect or their company? After all, the decision to do nothing is still a decision—it’s an action in itself.
As salespeople and leaders, should we simply accept this outcome from our prospects? More importantly, should we accept it from ourselves?
What is the financial value when we change our process to reduce or eliminate “do nothing”?
When we hear “do nothing” as the result of a sales process, it’s not just a lost deal—it’s a sign that we lost much earlier, generally during the Qualification or Discovery stages. It means we failed to uncover a compelling need, failed to create urgency, or failed to connect our solution to the prospect’s real pain points. As Celeste Berke-Knisely recently wrote about, did we understand the COI or Cost of Inaction?
Instead of accepting “do nothing,” let’s challenge ourselves to dig deeper during discovery, to ask better questions, to truly understand our prospects’ motivations and hesitations. Let’s treat every stalled deal as a chance to refine our approach and get better.
- Improve your qualification strategy and process. I ( selfishly ) like my own conversational qualification process, otherwise known as the “4 W’s”
- What happened? ( catalyst or trigger event )
- Why do you need to move to action now? ( Business problem )
- Who owns the project? ( senior level executive directing this contact to evaluate solutions )
- When do you need to be in production? ( not the purchase date, rather the date they need to go live, which signals an actual project )
- Improve your discovery. I fully support and endorse Gap Selling and not only because of the connection to Keenan and to this platform. It is the best discovery process that I have seen to uncover real business problems and financial opportunities.
- Do post-mortems on your lost deals in your 1:1s, in team meetings and if you are selling 5- and 6- figure deals, hire an outside consultant to interview those lost prospects.
- Put the info you learn from #3 into your CRM in free form text and then mine that data to inform your messaging and sales processes to drive constant improvement.
In sales, doing nothing is never really nothing—and we owe it to ourselves, our teams, and our companies to always strive for more.
