Demonstration only. This is a fictional teaching example. It contains no client information, measured client results, or promise of an outcome.
01 / The situation
Fictional situation: An AI software business reports growing inbound interest and demonstrations, while buying decisions regularly stall before commitment. Leadership is considering more demand generation.
Question: Would additional demand address the constraint, or increase the volume of opportunities that stall?
02 / Evidence before diagnosis
Examine a relevant mix of recent wins, losses, and stalled opportunities. Compare the buyer's stated reasons, stage definitions, elapsed time, qualification, commercial terms, and delivery questions. Include closed losses to reduce the bias of hearing only from enthusiastic prospects.
Do not treat a sales team's explanation or one interview as a settled diagnosis. Record what is observed, what is inferred, and which explanations remain plausible.
03 / Working hypothesis
Suppose that buyers repeatedly ask who will own implementation and how deployment risk will be managed. A reasonable hypothesis is that confidence in delivery is constraining decisions. Competing explanations include weak urgency, missing budget, procurement barriers, and an unclear economic case.
The response should test these alternatives. It should not assume that every stalled deal will close after a new presentation.
04 / Proposed intervention
| Work | Accountable role | Evidence of progress |
|---|---|---|
| Clarify implementation scope, responsibilities, and dependencies | Delivery lead | Buyers can describe who owns the next step and what it requires |
| Improve qualification around urgency, authority, and buying process | Commercial lead | Opportunities have a documented customer decision and path to it |
| Test the revised approach on an agreed relevant cohort | Sales and delivery leads | Stage progression and customer feedback improve against the baseline |
| Review capacity and economics before expanding volume | Leadership and finance | The delivery commitment is feasible and commercially worthwhile |
05 / Review and decision
Agree the cohort, baseline, review period, and progression definitions before testing. Examine conversion, time to decision, reasons for loss, and delivery load together. Record important changes in deal mix or market conditions.
Continue if evidence supports the intervention, revise if another constraint becomes clearer, and stop work that produces activity without useful learning. A before-and-after change alone does not establish causation.
06 / The leadership output
A short prioritized agenda: the constraint being tested, the action, the owner, the measure, the review date, and the next decision. The purpose is to make commercial work easier to direct and assess.
Apply this to your sales performance ↗