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Stall: convinced but afraid

Volunteer the bad news yourself

Tell the buyer the bad news before they find it, with your answer attached: your product's weak spots, the competitor's attack, the incumbent's last-minute discount, or your own over-chasing.

Evidence: studies from another field. Studies in other fields, such as psychology or negotiation, back it. The library applies them to sales.

What it is.

The buyer has gone quiet late in the deal. They may be checking something you have not told them: where the product falls short, who left after buying it, what your competitor says about you.

Tell them first, with your answer next to each point. Bad news they hear from you, already answered, costs you less than the same news found on their own.

The move changes shape with whose bad news it is. For your product, put the weak spots and the churned customers in front of the buyer before they go looking. For your competitor, tell the buyer what the rival will say about you before the rival says it, in a mild form with your answer attached, and repeat it at each meeting. For the incumbent in a switch, warn your champion early that the current vendor will come back in the last week with a discount or a retention offer, so the offer lands as something they expected. For your own behaviour, say out loud the worst thing the buyer might think of you, for instance after you have chased too hard, before you ask for anything. Chris Voss calls that last version the accusation audit.

What it looks like.

Naming the competitor first. Brian LaManna posted on LinkedIn about naming his biggest competitors on the first call, before the buyer runs the comparison without him. Jonathan Costet's battle card post for Gong gives a line to hand the buyer about a competitor: "One thing I'm pretty sure [insert competitor name] doesn't support is [insert landmine]", with a suggestion to ask the competitor about it at their next meeting. That plants a question about the rival rather than answering an attack on you, but it is the nearest published sales wording.

The inoculation structure, written out. No sales source publishes a script that answers a competitor's argument in advance. The inoculation videos from Truth Labs for Education, a collaboration between Cambridge, Bristol and Google Jigsaw, show the full structure in eleven short films: a warning that someone will try this on you, a weakened example of the trick, then the answer. They are about misinformation, not competitors.

The accusation audit. Derek Gaunt of Voss's firm, the Black Swan Group, defines it as writing down the negatives the other side may hold about you, your company and the circumstances, "sane or insane, fair or unfair", and saying them first. For a buyer who has gone silent, Gaunt's 2021 post puts the audit in the subject line: "It seems like I've done something to offend you" or "It seems like I've failed to provide some clarity". Voss pairs it with a question built so the easy answer is no, and his post on those questions adds the condition that matters on a deal you over-chased: account for how you got there, because the approach that produced the silence cannot be repeated. The method is in his book Never Split the Difference.

Pre-briefing the counteroffer, from recruiting. Greg Savage tells recruiters to hold the resignation conversation at the end of the first meeting, long before any offer: ask the candidate what their employer will say when they resign, what the employer might do, and how the candidate would respond, and if the answer is "it depends how much", take them back to the reasons they gave for leaving and ask whether money solves any of them. He repeats it at the interview briefing, the debrief and before the offer. In sales, Armand Farrokh warns the buyer ahead of time about his own side: if the deal slips into next month, his CFO will want to revisit the discount. No sales source publishes the version where the seller warns the champion about the incumbent.

Where it has been tested.

In B2B sales

Nobody has measured the move in deals. No study compares sellers who volunteered the bad news, answered the competitor in advance, pre-briefed the counteroffer or ran an accusation audit against sellers who did not.

When the competitor comes up, in Gong's data. Chris Orlob reported for Gong that across 24,077 competitive deals, the chance of closing was 24% higher when positioning against a competitor came up early in a new market and 20% lower when it came up late, and in a 2016 post that deals where the customer raised a competitor early were 49% more likely to close. Gong sells the call-recording software behind the figures and publishes no method. Both measure when the competitor came up, not whether anyone answered it in advance.

The firm's own claims. Black Swan says a reply is highly likely within 48 hours even after three months of silence, and a 2023 post by Marcella Oakley says labelling negatives has three times the impact of labelling positives. Neither comes with a method or a sample, and the firm sells negotiation training.

In other disciplines

Raising the damaging fact yourself, in court. Psychologists call this stealing thunder. Kipling Williams, Martin Bourgeois and Robert Croyle ran two mock trials with 257 and 148 students in 1993: the damaging fact was left out, raised by the other side, or raised first by the side it hurt. Raising it first cut its impact in both trials, because the speaker seemed more credible. A 2003 follow-up by Lara Dolnik and colleagues found it stopped working once the opposing lawyer told the jurors the tactic had been used on them.

Name the argument and answer it, or say nothing. Daniel O'Keefe's review of message experiments found that a message naming the opposing argument and answering it beats a one-sided message, while one that names the argument without answering it loses to both. Mike Allen's 1991 meta-analysis reached the same conclusion. Naming a weakness you cannot answer makes things worse.

Admitting a flaw helps only the competent. Elliot Aronson and colleagues played students a recording of a quiz contestant who answered 92% or 30% of questions correctly and then spilled a cup of coffee. The blunder made the strong contestant more likeable and the weak one less. Bob Fennis and Wolfgang Stroebe found the company version in three experiments: disclosing its own bad news helped a company with a poor reputation and made no difference to one with a good one.

A warning with the answer attached builds resistance, and fades. John Banas and Stephen Rains pooled 54 inoculation studies, the tradition William McGuire started in 1961, and found that a warning plus a weakened attack with its answer made people more resistant to the real attack than supportive messages or nothing, with resistance fading after about two weeks. Rakoen Maertens and colleagues found in three experiments that it held for at least three months when people were reminded at regular intervals, and faded within two months when they were not. The largest field test, by Jon Roozenbeek and colleagues in 2022, ran the videos as YouTube adverts to 22,632 users and found about 5% more people spotted the manipulation afterwards, just short of the smallest effect the authors had set in advance as worth having. One of the authors works at Google Jigsaw, which runs the programme. The one commercial test, Michael Pfau's 1992 study of comparative advertising, found resistance to a rival's claims, especially for expensive, high-involvement products, but small effects.

The warning has to name the trick. Esther Rozendaal and colleagues showed 146 children a programme carrying an advert for a chocolate spread. Telling them beforehand that adverts want them to like and buy things did nothing. Telling them that adverts are not always fair and sometimes say untrue things made them more sceptical and less keen on the product.

Committing to disclose everything, in theory. Paul Milgrom and Robert Weber proved in 1982 that an auction seller who commits in advance to publish all information, good and bad, earns more than one who reveals selectively, because bidders stop discounting against what they cannot see. It is a mathematical result about auctions, not an experiment on buyers.

Caveat.

Everything measured here was run on mock jurors, students, consumers, children and YouTube viewers, never on a buying group with a budget, and the only B2B numbers are one vendor's correlations about when competitors come up. The effect disappears once the audience is told the tactic is being used on them, and admitting a flaw helps only someone already seen as competent. Resistance built by a warning fades within weeks unless it is repeated.

Takeaway.

Name the weak spot, the competitor's argument, the incumbent's last-minute offer or your own over-chasing before the buyer meets it elsewhere, and put your answer in the same breath. Repeat it at each meeting rather than trusting one telling. The ordering, answer attached and said first, has strong support outside sales; what it does to a stalled deal has never been measured.

Sources.

Recommended by

B2B sales research and data

From other disciplines

Who says do not

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