Deals Don’t Die From Competition—They Die From Indecision

Matt Dixon explains that The Challenger Sale research began in late 2008 at CEB, the research organization later acquired by Gartner in 2017, where he ran the group serving heads of sales. The initial results were published for clients in 2009, and the 2011 book drew on an in-depth survey of 6,000 salespeople plus performance data for those sellers. The study was global and cross-industry, covering product and services companies of different sizes and growth rates. The research has continued since then, and Dixon says the dataset now covers roughly a quarter of a million salespeople.

The JOLT Effect research began in March 2020, when the pandemic pushed nearly every company’s sales process onto Zoom, Teams, Webex and other virtual platforms. Dixon had long admired Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling work, whose research team sat in on more than 30,000 sales calls, and he wanted to get closer to the actual sales conversation. His team recruited several dozen companies across industries and geographies, collected 2.5 million sales calls, and studied them with a machine-learning platform at scale.

Matt Dixon starts with a painful baseline: 40–60% of the average salesperson’s qualified pipeline—not raw leads, but opportunities the customer has engaged with—ends up marked closed-loss, no decision. He says that number is rising, especially in SaaS and the broader tech sector. For sellers, this means spending substantial time, energy, and company resources on opportunities that eventually go silent, with neither side fully understanding what happened.

Dixon describes the buying journey in three phases: the customer’s status quo, agreement on a vision that the status quo is no longer acceptable, and the action of actually buying. A major leakage point is between intent and action, after the customer has said the solution sounds great but before the contract is signed. In that gap, customers often relitigate concerns the salesperson thought were resolved months earlier, asking what could go wrong and whether this is really the right answer. Salespeople have been taught that hesitation means status quo bias, so they try to make the customer fear missing out.

Those FOMO tactics include reminding the customer of the benefits they will lose, dialing up fear, uncertainty and doubt, pointing to competitors that are already moving, and offering a discount that is only good this quarter. The goal is to create a burning platform and make inaction feel costly. Dixon says the data showed something different: when a customer is already backing away, dialing up FOMO backfires 87% of the time and increases the odds that the deal will be lost to no decision.

That finding was puzzling because it seemed to contradict The Challenger Sale’s emphasis on breaking status quo bias. Dixon says the earlier work was not wrong but incomplete: challengers are good at making the pain of same feel worse than the pain of change. The new data showed that once intent exists, tactics aimed at making the customer fear missing out can increase the odds of no decision. That is why the team went back to the data to ask a different question about what actually drives no-decision losses.

When Dixon’s team dug into why deals end in no decision, they found two different populations. About 44% of no-decision losses reflect genuine status quo preference: the customer thinks the current approach is good enough, the proposed change is not compelling, or the priority is too low. The other 56% want to buy but cannot buy because they are stuck in indecision, and that indecision stems from fear of failure. Dixon says the team read decades of cognitive psychology, including work on loss aversion and prospect theory, to understand the pattern.

The key concept is omission bias: people do not want to be blamed for decisions that lead to a loss. In the human mind, losses from doing nothing and losses from doing something are not equal. People are relatively comfortable with missing out, but they are not comfortable with messing up and being blamed for it. Dixon says this bias can be even more powerful than status quo bias.

For salespeople, the shorthand is that FOMU—fear of messing up—matters more than FOMO. If a seller tries to scare a customer with lost benefits or competitor pressure, the seller is addressing the wrong fear. The customer is not primarily afraid of missing out; the customer is afraid of being personally blamed if the purchase goes wrong. The seller’s job is to instill confidence that the customer is making a great decision and will look like a hero, not a fool.

Lenny raises a CRM example: a startup trying to unseat Salesforce is told it must be 10 times better to get attention, which feeds directly into the fear-of-failure problem. Dixon agrees that an unproven player faces an inherent leap-of-faith hurdle, but he cautions that the 800-pound gorilla is not immune either. He then lays out three drivers of fear of failure: whether the customer made the right choice, whether they will learn something after signing that makes the decision look bad, and whether they will actually see the promised ROI.

Dixon illustrates the second fear with an early-stage tech company that landed its first seven-figure deal and beat established competitors. About two weeks after the win, a new Gartner Magic Quadrant showed the company as middle-of-the-pack rather than a leader. The customer’s CTO faced internal criticism for choosing a so-so vendor and eventually backed out, saying he was spending every day convincing stakeholders that due diligence had been done. The customer kept researching because the customer did not want to be surprised by new information.

The big-brand incumbent is not immune to these fears. Dixon told an enterprise software company that its partner ecosystem, many cloud products, recent acquisitions, heavy press coverage, and larger eight- or nine-figure deal sizes create more choices, more opinions, and more anxiety for buyers. A startup may need to be 10 times better to overcome the leap of faith, but the 800-pound gorilla faces its own version of the problem.

Dixon also cites April Dunford’s point that buying software can now be more stressful than selling it. Even when the product looks like a no-brainer, customers can agree with the seller and still fail to decide because of the what-ifs. Dixon says this is not a rational ROI calculation for most buyers; it is an emotional calculation wrapped up in fear of failure.

Matt Dixon’s JOLT method is a four-part response to customer indecision: Judge the level of indecision, Offer a recommendation, Limit the exploration, and de-risk the deal by Taking risk off the table. The acronym is memorable, but Dixon says the sequence is not a rigid checklist. The point is to JOLT a customer forward when they want to buy but cannot bring themselves to act.

The J is the diagnostic step, which Dixon calls the carbon monoxide detector of sales because indecision is everywhere but odorless and tasteless. He notes that buyers, especially senior executives, tend to believe they are decisive; if asked, almost all would say they make the tough calls. The data tells a different story: 87% of buyers in the 2.5 million calls showed moderate or high levels of indecision, while only 13% were not worried about failure. The 13% are rational ROI buyers, but most customers are dealing with emotion.

To surface fear of failure, high performers use a technique Dixon calls pings and echoes, which was discovered after the book was written. Like sonar, the seller sends out a tentative articulation of what might be worrying the buyer and listens for confirmation or refutation. A ping might be: “A lot of customers at this point get overwhelmed by the options, and I probably made that worse—are you and your team clear on what would be in and out of the proposal?” Another might focus on whether the customer worries about a believability or execution gap around ROI. The response tells the seller whether the blocker is choice overload, endless research, or downside risk.

Dixon says options are a double-edged sword: they are useful early, at a trade show or first demo, but once the customer needs to decide, the seller must narrow the choices. Too many options can overwhelm the buyer, increase the chance of no decision, and create post-decision dysfunction when the customer reopens the agreement after second-guessing. The seller therefore has to shift posture from asking the customer what they want to recommending what they should do. Salespeople worry about being seen as pushy, but Dixon argues they know the product category far better than the customer does.

He uses a restaurant analogy: a server who answers “What do you recommend?” with “What are you in the mood for?” dumps the problem back on the diner. A great server instead names a favorite, explains why it is popular, notes the portion size, offers a lighter alternative, and reassures the diner that everything is good. That recommendation triggers the delegation effect: the burden of a bad decision is shared between the diner and the server. In complex sales, customers are looking for a partner to share the risk of choosing wrong.

The L, limit the exploration, addresses the customer who keeps doing reference calls and research and is never satisfied. Dixon says these customers do not want to be surprised, and they often do not trust the salesperson to be forthcoming about weaknesses. Great sellers build trust early by being brutally transparent—saying when a capability gets mixed reviews or when a competitor is better at a particular use case. They also demonstrate expertise rather than hiding behind a “clown car of experts” and becoming a glorified emcee. The customer must stop trying to be an expert and start trusting the seller as their expert.

The T is about taking risk off the table, and Dixon says one key is resetting expectations early. Average salespeople love it when a customer cites a case study showing 10X improvement and wants the same result, because it makes the business case easy. Great salespeople still stand by the case study but explain that everything went perfectly and that most implementations are not seamless. They build the business case around a more conservative number, such as 5X improvement seen in 100% of implementations, and then aim to over-deliver. That protects the customer from promising 10X and having to explain a 7X result to the CFO.

The other key is a safety net. That can mean pulling implementation, customer success, or account management into the call before the deal closes to roadmap the first six months, with stage gates, owners, metrics, and a cadence for connecting. It can also mean adding professional services and positioning them as an insurance policy rather than a free giveaway: the customer can DIY, but a block of expert hours keeps the A team available if something slips. In some industries, opt-out clauses or specialized contract carve-outs can also reduce risk. Dixon’s metaphor is that the customer should not feel like they are jumping out of an airplane alone; the seller is the tandem skydiving instructor guiding them safely to the ground.

Dixon’s final JOLT advice is to hit the pause button when a customer gets cold feet late in the process. The knee-jerk reaction for about 75% of the salespeople studied was to dial up FOMO, remind the customer of lost benefits, or use price and delivery-window urgency. Instead, the seller should ask whether the customer is indifferent or indecisive, because those are different problems requiring different responses.

Matt Dixon’s earlier book, The Challenger Sale, has sold about a million copies and argues that the best salespeople challenge a prospect’s thinking and teach them about the market. His shorthand is that most salespeople try to figure out what keeps the customer up at night, while challengers show the customer what should be keeping them up at night. Challengers bring an insight the customer does not have, often because the seller sees many more customers and can act as a window into the outside world.

Dixon offers the Dentsply example from The Challenger Customer. Dentsply had developed a lightweight, ergonomic, cordless dental wand that hygienists and dentists loved in demos, but it cost about three times more than the old corded wand, and buyers would put it back in the briefcase and ask for prices on drill bits instead. The breakthrough came when Dentsply connected the equipment to hygienist injuries, absenteeism, workers’ compensation costs, turnover, and rescheduled cleanings. The new pitch started with the dental office’s hygienist workforce problem and only then introduced the cordless wand as the way to solve it.

The lesson is to start with an insight the customer may not be aware of, help them see where things are going or what risk they are missing, and then transition tightly to how the seller’s unique solution addresses it. Dixon says a challenger conversation is not free consulting; it must lead to the seller’s unique benefits—create a fire and be the only person in town selling the fire extinguisher. He frames the core questions as: why should the customer buy from you instead of a competitor, in a way only your company can claim, and what would have to be true for the customer to pay a premium for that?