Before you ask for the decision, book a conversation to get the last worries said out loud, and ask to join the end of the buyer's internal meeting. Ask about 'something' else, not 'anything'.
"We'll take it to the team and come back to you." The team meets without you, and whatever worries them gets said in a room you are not in.
Before you ask for the decision, book a separate conversation whose only job is to get the buying group's remaining worries said out loud, and ask to be in the room when they are. A late price objection, a request for more time or a sudden silence is often the visible end of a concern that was raised in that meeting.
There are two published forms. Win the buyer's agreement early that a conversation about concerns will happen before they decide. Or ask for the last part of the meeting the buying group holds without you, so that whatever comes up gets answered while the group is still in the room.
Anthony Iannarino's ask for the last fifteen minutes, from July 2024. The trigger is the decision-maker saying they will meet their team in the next couple of weeks and get back to you. Ask for the last fifteen minutes of that meeting, because if the team has concerns, you are the best person to answer them. In The Lost Art of Closing he makes resolving concerns the eighth of ten commitments a seller has to win, just before the decision.
How he asks, from February 2023, in four parts. Accept that they need to talk to their team. Warn that concerns nobody answers can turn the team against your contact's own project. Say that his clients find it works best to invite him to that meeting, so the team is fully confident. Then ask how they could arrange it.
What he offers once a concern is named, from April 2014. References, a site visit, a visit to an existing client, a meeting with the people who will do the work, an ROI analysis, an implementation plan with dated milestones, reviews at thirty, sixty and ninety days, a guarantee, shared risk with fees at stake. If you do not know what the concern is, ask.
The question on Gong's blog. Chris Orlob, in August 2017, gives the question one seller he knows uses: what "obstacles and reservations need to be resolved" before the next step. His reason is that a concern left in the buyer's head stays unanswered.
Nobody has measured the move. No study compares deals where the seller booked a concerns conversation before the close with deals where they did not, and none tests whether joining the buyer's internal meeting changes the result.
The phase has a name in sales research. Neil Rackham's Major Account Sales Strategy (1989), written from Huthwaite's field research on large accounts, gives the last phase before the decision its own chapter, "Overcoming Final Fears". The book reports no test of scheduling the conversation.
In Gong's call data, won deals had more concerns, not fewer. Chris Orlob reported an analysis of 20,858 recorded B2B sales calls tied to the outcome of each deal. Lost deals scored 12.8% higher on Gong's measure of positive sentiment than won deals, and won deals carried more objections and concerns across the cycle. Gong sells the software that produced the measure, and this is a correlation: a deal that is really being decided may simply produce more friction than one that is drifting.
The word you ask with decides what you hear. John Heritage and colleagues ran a trial with 20 family doctors and 224 patients in Los Angeles County and a town in Pennsylvania. After the patient raised their first concern, doctors were randomly assigned to ask for further concerns in one of two ways. Asking whether there was "something else" cut patients' unmet concerns by 78% compared with visits where doctors did not ask. Asking whether there was "anything else" did no better than not asking. Neither question made the visit longer.
What goes unsaid is what does the damage. Christine Barry and colleagues recorded 35 patients with 20 family doctors in England and interviewed both sides afterwards. Only four of the 35 patients said everything they had come to say. The things most often left unsaid were worries about the diagnosis and the future, the patient's own idea of what was wrong, side effects, not wanting a prescription, and their situation at home. In all fourteen visits that ended badly, at least one problem traced back to something the patient had not said. The study has no comparison group.
Both measured findings come from medicine, where one doctor sits with one patient, not from a buying group meeting without the seller. The sales figures are correlations from a vendor's own call data. Nobody has compared deals that booked the conversation with deals that did not.
Book the concerns conversation before you ask for the decision, and ask for the end of the buyer's own meeting instead of waiting for the summary they send afterwards. When you ask what else is on their mind, ask about "something", not "anything". That wording is the one thing here tested in a trial, and the trial was in doctors' surgeries, so the size of the gain in a deal is unknown.