Founder-led sales · JTBD
Borrow the sales playbook. Then ask your buyers why it stalls.
A methodology like BANT, SPIN or MEDDPICC gives your sales conversations enough structure that stalls become visible. Decision research, done after the buyer has decided, reconstructs how the decision actually unfolded. Together they tell you which part of the process to change.
This week Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify, made a point I'd underline twice: founders shouldn't invent their own sales process, at least not at first. Pick an established methodology, follow it long enough to see where deals stall, and only then start changing parts of it.
I agree. I want to add the step that sits between seeing the pattern and changing the process.
Consistency is a research design choice
Customer research works on the same principle. Good interviews aren't scripts. But they cover comparable topics with every participant and anchor questions in concrete events, so you can compare what you hear across conversations while still following the threads that matter.
A sales methodology gives your pipeline that same structure. When every discovery call covers the same ground, a stall in week three means something.
Sales discovery and decision research answer different questions
These methodologies are more capable than they're often given credit for. SPIN in particular is built to explore the buyer's problems, the consequences of leaving them unsolved, and the value of solving them. A skilled seller using it is already asking why.
The difference is timing and vantage point. Sales discovery happens inside the deal. The buyer is still deciding, still choosing what to share, and often still managing you. Decision research happens after the decision is made, with buyers who chose you, chose someone else, or chose to stay put. It reconstructs how the decision unfolded across the whole journey, including the parts that happened before you were in the room and after you left it.
Sales discovery
Inside the deal
What the buyer shares while they're still deciding, in conversations you're steering toward a close.
Decision research
After the decision
How the decision actually unfolded, from the first sign of trouble to the final choice, told when there's nothing left to negotiate.
Say you run your process for a quarter and find that most deals die between discovery and proposal. That's a real finding. But it doesn't tell you whether to change your discovery questions, your demo, your pricing, or who you're selling to. Each of those is a different fix, and picking the wrong one costs you another quarter.
The methodology tells you where to look. The buyer tells you what you're looking at.
One stall reason, three different deals
Here's what that looks like in practice. Three deals in your CRM are marked closed-lost for the same reason. On the pipeline report, they're one pattern. In decision interviews, they turn out to be three different situations, each with a different response.
Closed-lost reason No budget × 3
Deal 01
Not enough value to switch
What the interview found
They had budget for tools in this category. They didn't see enough difference between your product and the spreadsheet process they already ran to justify the change.
What changes
Sharpen discovery around what the current way costs them, and position around the outcome they're struggling to reach. A discount won't fix this one.
Deal 02
Funding genuinely unavailable
What the interview found
A mid-quarter spending freeze pulled discretionary budget across the company. The champion still wanted it and expected to revisit in the next planning cycle.
What changes
Nothing in the pitch. Qualify for budget timing earlier, keep the relationship warm, and set a re-engagement date tied to their planning calendar.
Deal 03
Worried about implementation
What the interview found
The economic buyer liked the product but had lived through a painful rollout two years earlier. "No budget" was the easiest way to decline the risk.
What changes
Address the concern directly: a phased rollout, a clear onboarding plan, references from teams their size. A worry about adoption is showing up as a buying objection.
Illustrative example. The pattern is common; the specifics will be yours.
Same CRM field, three different fixes. Cut the price and you'd have helped none of them. That's what the interviews add: not a different label, but a better-supported explanation of what happened and a specific change worth testing.
What JTBD adds inside each methodology
Jobs to Be Done gives you a way to describe the buyer's side of the same decision. In the switching decisions I study, the story usually begins with a struggling moment, the point where the way someone was getting a job done stopped working well enough. From there it moves through a timeline: passively looking, a trigger that makes it urgent, actively looking, another trigger, deciding, and finally hiring a new solution or staying with the current one.
Along that timeline I look at six forces, an expansion of the classic four forces of progress that I use in my own work: Pushes away from the current way, Pulls toward a new solution, Desires for the outcome they're after, Avoidances of outcomes they want to escape, Habits and allegiances that keep them with the status quo, and Anxieties about the new thing.
None of this replaces your methodology. Each field still does its job. JTBD adds a layer of what to listen for during the deal, and decision research adds what to confirm after it.
BANT
Budget · Authority · Need · TimingQualify available budget and spending authority as usual. Alongside it, ask what they spend today getting the job done, including workarounds, spreadsheets and people's time. That cost strengthens the business case. It doesn't tell you whether funds are available.
Decision research addsWhether "no budget" meant no funds, not enough value, or a concern that was easier to call a budget problem.
Confirm who signs. Then separate that person from the people who feel the struggle day to day. They're often different, with different jobs.
Decision research addsWhose progress the purchase served, and who had to be convinced it was worth the risk.
Listen for the moment things broke, not only the feature wishlist. "We lost a deal because the forecast was wrong" tells you more than "we want better reporting."
Decision research addsThe struggling moment as the buyer remembers it, in their own words.
Ask what happened that made them start looking now. A weak or missing trigger is often a sign of low urgency.
Decision research addsThe events that moved buyers from passively to actively looking, and how long that took.
SPIN
Situation · Problem · Implication · Need-payoffHow do they get this job done today, step by step?
Decision research addsThe current solution you were really competing with, including the ones they didn't mention in the deal.
Where does that way break down? This is where the push shows up.
Decision research addsHow strong the push was, and whether it was growing or holding steady.
What does staying put cost them? SPIN already tests urgency here.
Decision research addsWhether the push outweighed habit and anxiety, one of the most common explanations for deals that end in no decision.
What progress would look like, in their words.
Decision research addsThe outcome buyers used afterward to judge whether switching was worth it.
MEDDPICC
Complex, multi-stakeholder dealsQuantify the impact using the measures the buyer already tracks.
Decision research addsHow buyers judged progress after they bought, which shows whether your metrics matched theirs.
Identify who controls the funds and has final say. Ask what success or failure would mean for their role.
Decision research addsWhat that person was concerned about, and what made the decision feel safe enough to approve.
Capture the formal criteria. Listen for the informal ones too. "Will my team actually adopt it?" rarely makes the written list.
Decision research addsThe unwritten criteria that turned out to decide the deal.
Map the actual approval and validation steps: who reviews, in what order, against what. Then note where the buyer sits in their own timeline.
Decision research addsWhat moved the deal through those steps, and what stalled it between them.
Map legal, security and procurement requirements early. Some late stalls are genuine constraints. Others may be unresolved concern about the switch surfacing as process.
Decision research addsWhich one it was. Treat concern-as-procurement as a hypothesis to investigate, not a default explanation.
Locate the pain precisely, with its context and consequences.
Decision research addsThe context, breakdown and stakes behind the pain, as the buyer experienced them.
Find someone with influence who will actively advocate for you internally. A strong personal push helps, but motivation alone doesn't make a champion.
Decision research addsWhat your champion needed to make the case internally, and where they ran short.
List the vendors, and include doing nothing and the spreadsheet they already have.
Decision research addsThe alternatives that never showed up on a shortlist.
The research that uncovers it
You can listen for all of this on live calls, and you should. Decision research adds what a live call can't: the buyer's account of the whole decision, told after it's made.
That's what a Switching Interview is for. You talk to people who recently made the decision, buyers who chose you and buyers who chose an alternative, and reconstruct what happened from their first thought about changing through the moment they hired a new solution. A No-Decision interview does the same for prospects who went quiet, but it first has to confirm what they actually did. Going quiet can mean they stayed with what they had. It can also mean they bought elsewhere, paused the project, or are still deciding.
How the interview works
Lead with events. Ask buyers to walk you through what happened, in order, in their own words: when they first noticed the problem, what they tried, what made it urgent. Then probe concerns and motivations in the context of the moments they describe. "What were you weighing when it came down to the two options?" gets a truer answer than "What made you anxious?" asked cold.
One caution. Interviews explain why. They don't produce rates. Your win rate and no-decision rate come from your CRM and your pipeline, not from a small batch of conversations. Use the numbers to find where to look, and the interviews to understand what you find there.
In the Four Customer Decisions framing, this is the difference between decision 01, Act (change or stay with the status quo, which shows up in your no-decision rate) and decision 02, Buy (choose you or an alternative, which shows up in your win rate). A stall in your pipeline is often one or the other, and the fix differs depending on which.
Putting it together
- Borrow a methodologyPick the one that fits how you sell. BANT for shorter, more transactional cycles. SPIN for discovery-heavy conversations. MEDDPICC for complex deals with several stakeholders and a formal buying process.
- Run it consistentlyHold the process steady long enough to see real patterns in where deals slow down and which fields keep coming back thin.
- Find the stall pointsLet the pipeline data tell you where to look. Separate deals lost to a competitor from deals lost to no decision, as far as your data allows.
- Talk to the buyersInterview a handful of recent wins, losses and no-decisions. Reconstruct each timeline, starting with what happened.
- Change one part, then measureThe interviews give you a better-supported explanation and a specific change to test. Make it, hold the process steady again, and see whether the pattern moves.
Borrow someone else's playbook first. Then make it yours, with your buyers' help.
Questions founders ask
Why do qualified B2B sales deals stall after discovery?
A deal can look fully qualified and still stall, because qualification confirms that budget, authority, need and timing appear to be present, not that the buyer is ready to change. Common reasons include urgency that was weaker than it seemed in discovery, disagreement among stakeholders about the problem or the solution, concerns about switching such as implementation risk or team adoption, and genuine approval constraints like budget cycles, security review or procurement. These situations often look identical in a CRM. Interviewing buyers after the decision is how founders tell them apart.
How can founders tell a competitive loss from a no-decision?
CRM labels and prospect silence are not enough to tell them apart. A deal marked closed-lost may have gone to a competitor, or the buyer may have kept their current approach. A prospect who stopped responding may have done either, or simply postponed. The reliable way is to confirm with the buyer what happened: they chose an alternative, retained their current approach, postponed the decision, or remain undecided. The distinction matters because a competitive loss and a no-decision usually call for different changes.
How does Jobs to Be Done relate to BANT, SPIN or MEDDPICC?
Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) adds to sales methodologies like BANT, SPIN and MEDDPICC rather than replacing them. The methodology structures what a seller learns during the deal. JTBD adds a way to describe the buyer's side of the decision: the struggle that started the search, the events that made it urgent, and the forces pulling toward or holding back from a change. Retrospective JTBD decision research then reconstructs how the decision unfolded across the whole buying journey, including what happened before and after the sales conversations.
Which sales methodology should a founder start with?
Choose one that fits how you sell and run it consistently long enough to see patterns. BANT suits shorter, more transactional cycles. SPIN suits discovery-heavy conversations. MEDDPICC suits complex deals with several stakeholders and a formal buying process. Qualification frameworks and discovery methods can also be combined: many teams use SPIN-style questioning to run discovery and BANT or MEDDPICC to track qualification. Holding the approach steady is what makes stalls comparable.
Can interviews tell me my win rate or no-decision rate?
Customer interviews cannot reliably estimate win or no-decision rates. Those rates come from CRM and pipeline data across all deals, and a small, self-selected batch of interviews cannot produce a population-level number. What interviews can do is explain why the rates look the way they do, giving founders a better-supported explanation and a specific change to test.
Who should founders interview to understand stalled deals?
To understand stalled B2B deals, founders should interview three groups: recent buyers who chose them, recent buyers who chose an alternative, and prospects who went quiet. For prospects who went quiet, the interview first has to confirm what actually happened. Silence can mean they stayed with their current approach, bought elsewhere, paused the project, or are still deciding.
Further readingThe Switching Interview guide · The Four Customer Decisions