How to Close More Deals.

Most deals do not die. They stall.

The rep says the call went great. The buyer said all the right things. Then the follow-ups go quiet, the next meeting gets pushed, and three weeks later the deal is sitting in the pipeline with a close date that keeps moving to the right.

What usually happens next is the same at almost every company I have seen. More follow-up. Another case study. A discount nobody asked for. None of it works, because none of it touches the thing that was actually missing.

I have sold for a living for most of my career. I managed restaurants, ran sales and marketing for a brewery, and then spent the last decade in healthcare staffing, where I helped build Uniti Med from a startup into one of the largest healthcare staffing companies in the country, with 10x revenue growth on the core brand. The thing I wish someone had told me earlier is that closing is not a personality trait. It is a diagnosis.

Why do deals stall?

Think of a closed deal like a combination lock. There are five tumblers, and all five have to line up before it opens. Get four and you have exactly nothing, because a lock that is eighty percent cracked is still a locked lock.

That is the idea behind LOCKS, the framework I teach sales teams. Each letter is a question the buyer is answering privately, whether or not anyone says it out loud. When a deal stalls, one of those questions has a no sitting on it. Your job is to figure out which one.

The five reasons deals stall, and what to do about each

The sale that taught me about Stakes

When I was selling beer for a brewery, we were in every major store in our market except one: the biggest retailer in the country. Every store manager I talked to told me the same thing. They did not decide. One buyer did.

So I called that buyer. Then I called again. And again. I learned where he worked out, hoping I might run into him. I was not subtle about it.

Eventually he answered. He told me I was persistent. Then he asked me if I knew how many SKUs were in his stores, and whether he bought paper clips. I understood what he meant. To him, my product was a paper clip. One more item in a building full of them.

I did not argue about how good the beer was. He already knew it was good. That was not the tumbler that was stuck. I told him what it was costing him to not carry it. It was a top seller in its category. Every one of his competitors stocked it. And the people who loved it were loyal enough that they would drive to a competitor to buy it, and while they were there, they would do the rest of their shopping too.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said: get me your best sellers, every store, and I want a display.

Persistence got me the call. Stakes got me the order. I did not make the product sound better. I made doing nothing sound expensive, because it was.

How do you find out which tumbler is stuck?

You ask, and then you listen longer than feels comfortable. Most reps hear an objection and immediately start answering it. The problem is that the first objection is often not the real one. The price is too high can mean they do not love it yet, they do not trust you yet, or they cannot see why it has to be this quarter. Those are three different problems with three different fixes.

LOCKS tells you where the deal is stuck. The conversation that follows is where most reps talk themselves out of it. That is what LAARC is for: Listen, Acknowledge, Ask, Respond, Confirm. Listen all the way to the end. Acknowledge so they feel heard, which is not the same as agreeing. Ask one more question to get to the real concern. Respond to what they actually said. Then confirm the concern is resolved before you move on, because a nod is not a yes.

LOCKS diagnoses. LAARC responds. Together they replace guessing with a process a whole team can use.

Why most closing advice does not work

A lot of what gets taught as closing technique is pressure dressed up as process. Assumptive closes, artificial deadlines, trial closes on the first call. Some of it works once. Very little of it works on a buyer who has been sold to before, which is most of them.

The reason pressure fails is that it pushes on all five tumblers at once without knowing which one is stuck. If the buyer already loves the product and trusts you, but cannot picture the rollout, a deadline does not help. It just makes them feel rushed on the one thing they were unsure about.

I would rather a rep close fewer deals with more certainty about why they closed than chase a closing script they cannot explain. The first approach can be taught to a whole team. The second only works for whoever happens to be naturally good at it.

What sales leaders can do this quarter

If you lead a team, the fastest win is changing the pipeline review. Instead of asking reps how a deal is going, ask which of the five they are least sure about. You will hear very different answers, and you will be able to coach to them.

You will also start to see patterns. Some teams lose most of their deals on Kickoff Plan because nobody owns onboarding in the sales conversation. Others lose on Stakes because reps are uncomfortable talking about the cost of doing nothing. Once you know where your team leaks, you know what to train. For the broader picture of where revenue actually comes from, see how to increase sales.