Do you still believe in “no-decision”?

The rule everyone repeats without checking

Sales consultants will tell you it's backed by Harvard Business Review, Gartner and Forrester. They'll stress how much data sits behind that research — so they don't have to explain anything further. Then they add the punchline: you're not losing to competitors, no decision was made at all.

And now you have a problem. In most cases, that conclusion is simply wrong.

Who can actually afford to “do nothing”

Only a negligible fraction of B2B companies (typically B2G or huge enterprise projects) can realistically afford to “do nothing” — and usually only when they freeze an entire project because of shifting priorities or market volatility.

Leave out public institutions and large corporate projects and the rest of the B2B market (SMB, which is 90 % of all businesses worldwide) keeps running without pause. A company cannot freeze in a no-decision state. To generate revenue it has to sell. And to sell, it has to buy. There is no other way.

So where does “no-decision” come from?

To understand the phenomenon, look at where the research data comes from: self-reported CRM data — exports from the CRM systems of the corporations included in the research sample.

We all know how a corporate sales process works: every deal that isn't closed requires an exit review — a precise explanation of why it didn't happen. That puts enormous pressure on salespeople: they have to pry a reason out of the customer.

But customers have neither the time nor the appetite for that questioning, and in the vast majority of cases they give no feedback at all.

So the salesperson has a problem. What's the fastest way out? Tick the “No-decision” box in the CRM. The deal is closed, nothing needs explaining, everyone is happy. And the world gets a global myth that 60 % of deals die of indecision.

In the real world, a decision was made

You just don't know what it was. The outcome simply said: “We will do nothing about buying from you.” The deal is lost — either to the incumbent supplier or to another competitor. That part is secondary. What matters is that your offer wasn't good enough and the deal is lost. That's the fact.

“No-decision” is not the absence of a decision. It's a decision whose reason you never learned.

B2B is full of similarly distorted rules — see our takes on UVP in classic B2B sales or on the TCO trap.

And you know what? That's actually fine

In traditional B2B, cases where a client buys right after the first few meetings are extremely rare. To close a deal, both sides have to be commercially active (you want to sell, the client wants to buy). In 95 % of first-touch situations, only you are active. Your prospect doesn't want to change anything at that moment.

If clients have no urgency and don't trust you yet, pushing them makes no sense. You have to build awareness of yourself and your products systematically and with discipline.

More on this in Cold calling: Still the king of business development? And why 99 % of salespeople do it wrong. You can see how we approach sales at SharpBrain.