“We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.” - Blaise Pascal
I was helping a sales leader at a B2B software company with a deal at a major account. He ran me through the history—the deal had been running for three months. The champion was engaged, the technical evaluation had gone well, the business case was solid. But he felt the deal was stalling and it made no sense to him.
I asked him one question. "What does this prospect believe about this problem right now — not about your product, about the problem itself?"
There was a pause.
"They think the problem is annoying," he said. After a beat, he added, "Not critical."
That was it. Three months of a well-constructed sales motion and the prospect had never been moved off their original view of the situation. They had understood the product. They had never been made to see the problem differently.
Getting the customer to tell their story
Most salespeople, when a deal stalls, go back to the product. They sharpen the pitch. They add a case study. They escalate to a new contact. All of these moves work from the same assumption — that the buyer's view of the situation is accurate, and that the job is to produce better evidence within it.
The sales leader I was working with went back to his champion with a different kind of conversation. He didn't bring a new deck. He also didn't go in with an agenda. The move only works when the salesperson’s interest in the buyer's experience is real.
A strategically patient silence reads differently from a genuinely curious one, and buyers in long relationships know the difference.
He asked the champion to walk him through what a typical week looked like when the problem was at its worst — not the aggregate cost, not the system failure rate, the actual experience. What they had to do. Who they had to call. What they told themselves to get through it.
By the end of that conversation, the champion had talked themselves into urgency the sales leader had been trying to manufacture for three months. The problem hadn't changed. What changed was how the champion had articulated it — to themselves, out loud, in their own words.
That's what the right story does. It doesn't argue with the buyer's perception. It gives them a way to see their situation that they couldn't quite put into words themselves.
Watch It In Action
Niro Sivanathan, a professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, has a 13-minute TED talk on what he calls the dilution effect — the counterintuitive finding that adding weaker arguments to your strongest ones actually makes your case less persuasive, not more.
It explains precisely why piling more evidence onto a stalled deal doesn't move it. The problem was never the evidence. Watch specifically for the dinnerware experiment — the moment where the research shows how adding more information to a strong argument makes the argument weaker in the listener's mind.
Try This Week
For any deal that feels stalled, try this before your next conversation:
Ask yourself what the buyer currently believes about the problem — not your product, the problem. Is it urgent or manageable? Costly or inconvenient? Your pitch is probably calibrated for the former. Their mental model may be firmly in the latter.
In your next conversation, ask the buyer to walk you through a recent experience of the problem. Not just the data but the actual experience. What happened, who was involved, what they had to do about it. Let them narrate — don't summarise it for them.
Don't move to your solution until you've heard them describe the cost of the current state in their own words. That moment — when they say it rather than you — is when perception starts to shift.
From Elsewhere
In Iceland, þetta reddast (pronounced "thetta red-ast") is the closest thing the country has to a national motto. It translates roughly as "it will all work out" — but Icelanders use it not as denial of difficulty but as a genuine operating principle: a calm confidence, shaped by centuries of volcanic eruptions and unpredictable winters, that effort and adaptability will find a way through. It is a reminder that a great deal of what we worry about resolves itself if we stay in motion. Read more »