When the Number Is Uncertain, Waiting Has a Cost

 The challenge isn’t making a faster decision. It’s getting to the right understanding sooner.

Summary

When revenue falls short, most leadership teams do not suffer from a shortage of explanations. They suffer from having several, each of them plausible, none of them tested against what the buyer is actually doing. This article looks at what it costs while that gets worked out. Not the revenue already missed, but the compounding cost of continuing to invest in whatever produced the uncertain number in the first place. It draws on my experience selling security technology to financial services institutions, where three quarters of genuine buyer engagement turned out to be a conversation with the wrong buyer, and on research from McKinsey, Matthew Dixon, Ted McKenna, and Barry Staw. The objective is not to decide faster. It is to reach the right understanding sooner.

Too many answers

A particular kind of pressure comes with knowing the number won’t land.

The quarter is closing behind plan. The board meeting is already on the calendar. And everyone around the leadership table has a view about why.

What I remember most clearly from being in that seat is not that we lacked answers. It is that we had too many.

Sales could explain it. Marketing could explain it. Customer Success could explain it. Each explanation described something real. Each was defensible. And they did not agree with one another.

An abundance of answers is easy to mistake for understanding.

So the discussion continues. Another set of numbers is requested. Another meeting is scheduled. Nobody is being slow or evasive. The leadership team is trying to work out which explanation is right before committing the company to a course of action, which is reasonable.

The clock is already running

The difficulty is that the business does not pause while this happens.

Sales keeps working the pipeline it has, against a buyer theory they have. Marketing keeps spending against that positioning. Opportunities age. Management time is consumed. Forecasts become less reliable, which changes how the board reads everything said next. And the recovery requirement grows, so a month of delay does not cost a month. It raises what the following quarter has to deliver.

The company is not standing still. It is continuing to invest in whatever produced the uncertain number.

That is the cost of indecision, and it is easy to miss because none of it appears as a line item. It shows up later, as a bigger gap and less time to close it.

Three quarters

We were selling security technology to financial services institutions.

Security mattered then, but it was nothing like it is today. We believed what we had was genuinely good, and I still think it was. More importantly, our prospects agreed. They agreed the problem was real. They agreed the technology worked. What they did not share was our sense of urgency.

The process moved forward anyway. They asked for demonstrations. They asked for architecture reviews. They brought in their technical teams and spent real time with us.

If you had looked at our pipeline, it would have looked healthy. Sophisticated buyers were investing serious effort in evaluating us. That is not a weak signal. It is exactly the kind of evidence a leadership team treats as validation.

It went on for three quarters.

We eventually understood that the CIO had to make the decision, because most of these institutions had no dedicated security executive at the time. And CIOs didn’t believe the problem was as serious as we were telling them.

That meant every conversation we had was an education conversation. We were teaching a buyer why they should care.

That feels like value. It feels like consultative selling. Looking back, it was the clearest signal available that we were talking to somebody for whom the problem was not yet a problem.

The second cost

Pressure eventually forces action, and the action is usually reasonable.

We did two things. We got more senior, on the logic that if the message was not landing, we should raise the level of the conversation. And we gave away pilots, on the logic that if only they used it, they would believe.

The second one is worth sitting with, because the reasoning is sound right up until it isn’t. It treats a belief problem as an experience problem.

A free pilot doesn’t create urgency for a buyer who doesn’t own the problem. It removes the last remaining cost of not deciding. Our CIO could run that pilot indefinitely, because nothing about delaying showed up anywhere he was measured. And the pilots generated more meetings, more engagement, and a pipeline that looked healthier than it was.

We were spending more to justify what we had already spent. Barry Staw’s work on escalating commitment describes this pattern well. Once a course of action has absorbed enough investment, continuing becomes easier to defend than stopping, and each additional commitment is made partly to protect the ones before it.

This is why the cost of acting on the wrong diagnosis deserves as much attention as the cost of waiting. Adding sellers, changing compensation, replacing a leader, lowering price, or buying technology may each be the right move. Each also takes a quarter or two to disprove. The wrong one is more expensive than the delay it relieved.

There is a useful symmetry here. Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, analyzing more than two and a half million recorded sales conversations, found that between forty and sixty percent of deals are lost not to a competitor but to no decision at all. More striking is what sits inside that number. In the majority of those losses, the customer was not clinging to the status quo. They had accepted the need to change and could not bring themselves to act.

Buyers stall for the same reason leadership teams do. They lack the confidence to act on what they have. We usually recognize it in them faster than in ourselves.

Speed is not the opposite of quality

It would be easy to read all of this as an argument for deciding faster. I do not think that is the lesson.

McKinsey’s research on organizational decision making found that only about a third of executives said their organizations made decisions that were both high quality and timely. The more useful finding runs against instinct. Most organizations behave as though speed and quality are a trade-off, and the data pointed the other way. Faster decisions tended to be better.

Which suggests the constraint is not deliberation itself. It is what the deliberation is spent on.

This reframes the problem. The objective is not to shorten the time to a decision. It is to shorten the time to the right understanding. Those are different targets, and only one of them is worth optimizing.

What an answer has to contain

A salesperson tells me an opportunity has a seventy percent probability of closing.

Why seventy?

Usually the answer is that discovery is complete, the demonstration has happened, the proposal has gone in, and the opportunity sits at the right stage. All of that is real work. None of it establishes that the customer intends to buy.

So the questions worth asking are simple. Why will they buy? Why now? Why us? And who inside their organization carries the cost if this problem is never solved?

If those cannot be answered from something the customer actually said or did, then what we have is limited visibility presenting itself as confidence.

I do not think the chief executive should investigate every account personally. That creates a dependency on one person’s thinking and does not scale. The role is narrower and more durable than that. It is to set the standard of evidence. To be clear about what an acceptable answer has to contain, and to keep asking until the organization can connect its conclusions to something the buyer did.

What I would do differently

Our three quarters did not end because somebody asked a better question. They ended because we missed our targets and ran out of time. The answer, when we found it, we found by accident. Someone referred us to the head of fraud, who had a number that moved if the problem went unsolved: same product, same pitch, entirely different economics of caring.

That question was available to us from the first meeting. Nothing prevented us from asking it. We had capable people and a good product. What we did not have was anything in our process pointed at finding out who owned the pain.

Looking back at the years since, the pattern I recognize is not that leadership teams decide too slowly. It is that they spend the waiting period looking for a better answer rather than better evidence, and the two are not the same.

So when the number is uncertain, and the explanations are plentiful, the question I keep returning to is small.

“How do we Know” Refer to this white paper for an easy framework to help you think through this process.

References

Aminov, I., De Smet, A., Jost, G. and Mendelsohn, D. Decision Making in the Age of Urgency. McKinsey & Company, April 2019.

Dixon, M. and McKenna, T. The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. Portfolio, 2022.

McKinsey & Company. Want a Better Decision? Plan a Better Meeting. May 2019.

Staw, B. M. Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1976.

Related Articles