For each deal you are counting on, write down the few reasons this particular deal will be lost, and let them set your next move instead of the next stage in the process.
The deal looks fine in the CRM. You are not sure it is.
While the deal is still alive, write down the reasons you are going to lose it: not risk in general, but the reasons particular to this account, taken from what was said on the calls and from what you have not managed to find out. Then work those reasons, instead of whatever next step the process would have you book.
It is the sales version of the premortem, a planning exercise in which a team is told its plan has already failed and asked to explain why.
Gary Klein's premortem, in Harvard Business Review in September 2007. The team hears the plan. The leader then says the project has failed spectacularly, and each person spends a few minutes writing down, alone, every reason they can think of, including the ones they would normally keep quiet. The leader goes round the room taking one reason from each person until all are recorded, and the project manager then works through the list for ways to strengthen the plan.
The same procedure in five steps, as Klein and colleagues wrote it out in 2010: get familiar with the plan, imagine it failed completely, write the reasons, combine the lists, then revisit the plan. The room is told that a crystal ball shows the plan was a fiasco at a set point in the future, six months out for instance, without showing why. Each person writes alone for two minutes before anyone speaks.
The sales version. Brian LaManna's LinkedIn post opens "For each deal, I write out why I'll lose it"; the rest of the post needs a LinkedIn login. Nate Nasralla's stuck-deal play at Fluint, published in June 2026, says to stop selling and start diagnosing: run a pre-mortem, form a guess about the real blocker, narrowed to politics, budget or a missing stakeholder, then test it with a message that names the elephant in the room and gives the buyer a way out. The message itself sits inside Fluint's product.
Nobody has measured it. No study compares sellers who wrote down their loss reasons with sellers who did not. Fluint says its play came out of patterns across more than 150,000 deal cycles in its own product, and publishes no method or numbers.
What usually belongs on the list. Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna reported in Harvard Business Review in June 2022, from more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations analysed on the platform of Tethr, which sells the analysis software, that 40% to 60% of deals are lost to buyers who say they intend to buy and then do not act. That is not a test of the pre-mortem, but it says the likeliest true reason is the buyer's own indecision, not a competitor, which is not where most loss lists start.
It lowers confidence more than a critique does. Beth Veinott, Gary Klein and Sterling Wiggins ran 178 students through five conditions in 2010. Each group rated a campus lockdown plan written to look complete but with real flaws, then spent two minutes on a filler task, a critique, pros and cons, cons only, or assuming the plan had failed and writing why. Confidence fell 25 points in the pre-mortem group, against 14 for pros and cons and 12 for cons only; the critique changed almost nothing. After writing fixes, confidence rose again, most in the pre-mortem group. Klein co-wrote the study, so the method's author measured his own method, on undergraduates. A 2020 replication by Elizabeth Keysor and colleagues, with 53 students and a different plan, found the same drop only when people imagined failure, not success.
The 30% everyone quotes is not what it seems. Klein's HBR piece credits a 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo and Nancy Pennington with showing that imagining an event has already happened improves the ability to identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. His own co-authors, in the 2010 paper above, describe it differently: being told the outcome was certain raised the number of reasons people produced by about 30%, and nobody judged whether the reasons were any good. Jason Collins makes the same correction in his course notes.
Too many reasons backfires. Norbert Schwarz reports an experiment in which people asked to list ten ways an event might have turned out differently ended up more certain of the actual outcome than people asked for two, because finding ten was hard and they read the difficulty as proof there were few. Keep the list short.
Every controlled test used university students rating a campus plan, with the method's author on the first, and all of them measured confidence rather than whether anything turned out better. Nobody has run it on a live deal or checked whether the reasons a seller writes are the reasons deals are actually lost.
For each deal you are counting on, write down the few reasons this particular deal will be lost, and let them set your next move. Include the buyer's own indecision, which is the reason large call data says is most common. The measured effect is that imagining failure punctures false confidence better than a critique; whether it wins deals is untested.