Who’s haunting your pipeline?

With Halloween coming up this weekend, it’s a good time to count the ghosts and zombies in your pipeline and (even worse) your forecast, and to ask how they got there.

Every sales leader knows the feeling. A deal that looked promising a month ago has gone quiet. Emails go unanswered. The champion who was so keen in the last meeting has stopped returning calls. The opportunity is still in the CRM, still carrying a close date at the end of the quarter, and still contributing to the forecast. Nobody wants to be the one to declare it dead.

This is a bigger problem than most forecasts admit. Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna’s research for The JOLT Effect found that somewhere between 40% and 60% of lost deals end in no decision. The buyer doesn’t choose a competitor. They simply choose to do nothing.

Most of these deals don’t die suddenly. They were never fully alive. Ghosts are made, not born, and they are usually made early in the sales cycle, when a salesperson mistook interest for commitment.

Ghosts and zombies are different problems

A ghost is a buyer who has gone silent. The signs are hard to miss: unanswered emails, meetings cancelled without a new date, and a contact who used to reply within hours and now replies within weeks, or not at all.

Zombies are more dangerous, because they look like they might still be alive. They still take your calls, attend demos and ask for yet another revised proposal. But nothing moves. You’ll usually recognise a zombie by some combination of these:

• The close date has slipped two or three times, and each new date was proposed by the seller
• Nobody beyond your original contact has engaged
• Your contact can’t, or won’t, explain how the decision will be made or who will make it
• There is no mutually agreed plan to a decision, or the plan only exists in your CRM
• The buyer’s reason for acting is the same vague aspiration it was three months ago

Ghosts are at least visible. Their silence forces the question. Zombies hide in the forecast, consume your team’s time and give everyone a reason to avoid asking the difficult questions.

How to deal with the ones you already have

With a ghost, resist the urge to send another “just checking in” email. Send one honest, direct message instead. Something like: “I haven’t heard from you since we met on the 12th, which probably means your priorities have changed. That’s fine, and it would help me to know. Should I close this out for now?”

Buyers often respond when you give them permission to say no. If they don’t, you have your answer.

It’s also worth going wide. If your main contact has gone silent, other stakeholders may know why. If there are no other stakeholders to contact, that tells you something too: the deal was single-threaded, and it was always vulnerable. A quick look at LinkedIn can explain a lot. A contact who has changed role or left the business is a frequent reason for sudden silence.

Zombies are harder, because the seller’s hope is what keeps them alive. The cure is to requalify the deal against evidence rather than optimism, and to ask the buyer for a commitment that a properly qualified opportunity would happily make. That might be a meeting with the Economic Buyer, agreement to a decision timeline, or access to the people who will need to sign off the purchase. A jointly agreed plan to a decision is one of the most useful tests. If the buyer won’t help you build one, or keeps postponing the conversation, you’ve learnt how much the project really matters to them.

A buyer who is serious about solving a problem will usually accept a reasonable request. A zombie will find another reason to delay. Either way, you learn something you didn’t know before.

Sales leaders have a part to play here. If salespeople are criticised every time their pipeline shrinks, they will keep the undead on the books. I’d much rather see honest disqualification rewarded, and deals that end in no decision recorded as such and reviewed, so the team can learn why they stalled. Pipeline reviews help too. Ask what has changed since the last review and what evidence supports it, rather than how the salesperson feels about the deal.

How to stop creating them in the first place

Most ghosts and zombies can be traced back to a gap in the early stages of the sales cycle. The two most common gaps are the first two questions in my Outcome-Centric Selling® framework: “why act” and “why now”.

If the buyer can’t explain why they need to change, and why that change has to happen by a particular date, it probably isn’t a qualified opportunity - and it certainly isn’t an urgent one. There might be interest. Interest is easy to generate and even easier to abandon when something with a higher priority comes along. The reason also has to belong to the buyer. A compelling event that only exists in your head won’t survive the first budget review.

The JOLT research adds an important nuance. Many buyers who end up doing nothing actually set off thinking they need to change. But they stalled because they were afraid of making the wrong decision. That’s where the other two Outcome-Centric questions - “why choose us” and “why trust us” - come in. The buyer needs to feel confident enough in their choice to defend it internally.

Evidence-based qualification is the other key line of defence. The two elements I added to MEDDPICC to create MEDDPICC+ are especially useful for spotting future ghosts:

• ICP Fit. It’s possible to sell to an organisation that sits outside your ideal customer profile, but the sale will be harder and more likely to stall. Fit isn’t only about size and sector. A prospect whose current priorities lie elsewhere will run out of energy as soon as something more pressing appears.
• Close Date Confidence. Salespeople must honestly acknowledge whether the close date currently recorded in CRM reflects when the customer must act, when they have confirmed want to act, or when the salesperson hopes they will act. Unless there’s evidence for “must” or “want”, the answer defaults to “hope”. The fact that it’s the end of your quarter is never a buying event.

The more familiar elements matter too. A contact who disappears was often a friendly coach rather than a true Champion: someone who liked talking to you but lacked the influence or motivation to sell your solution internally. And a deal where you’ve never met the Economic Buyer is a deal where the person who can say no hasn’t yet said yes.

None of this works as a one-off exercise. Ghosts rarely appear overnight. The warning signs are usually visible weeks or months earlier to anyone who systematically requalifies their opportunities against evidence at every review.

Check your pipeline for signs of life

If you’d like a more disciplined way of testing which of your deals are genuinely alive, I’ve set out the full MEDDPICC+ framework, including the questions behind each element and guidance on putting it into practice, in my free eBook, Mastering MEDDPICC+. Download it here.

Then take a fresh look at your pipeline this weekend. How many of those deals are still breathing?