Why Your Sales Process Is Leaking Deals (And Most Frameworks Won't Fix It)
Jul 23, 2026
I've been in sales a long time. Long enough to have worked alongside Brian Tracy for six and a half years, and to have heard every big framework going around: SPIN selling, the Challenger sale, consultative selling, value-based selling, straight-line selling, the Big Four's pursuit methodology. I've used most of them. I've trained teams on several of them.
They all share the same flaw.
Every one of them assumes there's one right way to sell. One process, one sequence of steps that works on every buyer, every time, if you just execute it well enough.
It doesn't hold up. And the numbers prove it.
Take B2C solar — an industry I've worked in closely. The best operators I've seen convert paid leads at around 45%. That means more than half the people who were actively in the market to buy solar — who clicked, who filled in a form, who wanted the product — walked away without buying. Not because they didn't need it. Because somewhere in the process, the fit between how they buy and how they were sold to broke down.
Go up the food chain into B2B — ERP systems, CRM rollouts, change management, enterprise architecture — and it gets worse. Most organisations I see are converting somewhere between 18% and 25% of qualified opportunities. Think about what that costs. Months, sometimes years, of relationship-building. Travel, meals, salaries, marketing spend, all funnelled into pipeline. And three-quarters of it evaporates.
Here's the part that should really bother you: that waste is predictable. Behavioural science tells us exactly why. Not everyone is motivated to buy the same way, or on the same timeline, and yet almost every sales framework in circulation was built by someone with a particular way of thinking about business, and that preference got baked into the "system."
If a D-style, results-driven executive designs your sales process, you'll get a fast, assertive, decision-forcing framework. Great for the roughly 18% of the population who are also D-style. Terrible for the 36% who are S-style — people who move at their own pace, hate being pressured, do their due diligence, and will smile and nod right through a system that isn't built for them, all while quietly deciding not to buy.
That's not a training problem. It's a design problem.
The fix isn't a better script. It's building more than one path to yes, calibrated to how different buyers — and different stakeholders in the same deal — actually make decisions. In solar, that might mean one path for the buyer who wants a fast, incentive-driven decision, and a completely different one for the buyer who wants to slow down, compare, and feel in control. In B2B, with five or six stakeholders in a room, it means recognising that your champion, your economic buyer, and your risk-averse gatekeeper are not going to say yes for the same reasons — so stop trying to sell them the same way.
Done properly, this isn't a marginal improvement. We've seen conversion rates move from the low twenties into the 65-95% range, including on closed tenders, without discounting, and sometimes as the highest-priced option in the room.
The lesson underneath all of it: stop starting with your product, your process, your years in business. Start with the buyer in front of you, work out how they actually decide, and build the process backwards from there.
If that's a conversation worth having for your business, I'd welcome it.
