Why most deals are won after the meeting

Most salespeople believe the deal is won in the meeting.

It isn’t.

The meeting creates clarity. The follow-up creates commitment.

In this episode, we break down why momentum after the conversation determines whether opportunities accelerate… or quietly stall. You’ll learn how elite sellers turn strong meetings into structured next steps, stakeholder alignment, and measurable progress — instead of vague promises and calendar silence.

We unpack:

• Why “Great call — we’ll get back to you” is a warning sign
 • How to leave every meeting with defined movement
 • The difference between activity and momentum
 • Why written follow-up beats verbal agreement
 • How top performers design post-meeting control without pressure

Because buyers rarely decide in the room.

They decide afterwards — when they review risk, consult stakeholders, and weigh urgency.

If your deals tend to slow down after strong conversations, this episode will change how you manage momentum forever.

Meetings create opportunity.

What happens next determines whether it closes.

🎧 Follow the show for practical insights that separate average sellers from elite performers.

Welcome to the podcast!

Transcript

Alignment Versus Commitment

Why Good Meetings Still Stall

What Buyers Do After You Leave

Four Predictable Failure Points

Silence, Bias, And Time Convincers

No Clear Next Step

Respecting Timelines Without Pressure

No Timeline Pressure

No Stakeholder Strategy

No Written Reinforcement

The Momentum Framework

Cognitive Bias After Meetings

Average Vs Top Performers

The Discovery Foundation And CTA

SPEAKER_00 0:07

If you think that deals are running meetings, you are giving away control, and that's really important. So, one of the things you have to understand is that meetings create alignment, but it's the follow-up that creates commitment. So, in this podcast, what I'm going to look at is why many deals stall after strong meetings, what buyers actually do after you leave, and how to design momentum intentionally. So, this ties in with the theme of this series of podcasts, and I hope you're finding it useful. So, my name's Graeme Elliott from Salescraft Training. Let's get stuck into it. So, what do you think happens when you leave a meeting? So, and you may well have had experience with this. I would guess you have, because you have possibly bought things with somebody else, be it personally or professionally. So, think about the kind of process that you went through when you were buying something, what happened when you got away from the salesperson? So typically what will happen is that buyers will have a debrief internally. They will talk through how things went, what how they feel about it. What will happen there is that they're likely to reinterpret the value, they are likely to raise unspoken concerns. So I spoke about this a couple of episodes ago. They are likely to reframe the cost versus the risk, and they may well be consulting unseen stakeholders. Now, all of these things can really turn a deal on its head, and you have no control of it at all. So the danger here is that if if you don't guide this process, the uncertainty, both for the buyer and for you, in bringing this sale in will definitely grow. So an important thing to remember is that silence after a meeting doesn't necessarily mean indecision, it can mean unstructured thinking, and there are also certain types of bias or certain personality types that will need time. They're a period of time convincer, is the phrase we use with behavioral analysis. And I talk about this in much more detail in my online course, consultative selling. So if you want to do a deeper dive and have a deeper understanding of that, there is more information there. So let's look at why deals stall. So there are predictable points where things will go wrong, and I'm gonna look at four of them. So the first one is that there's no clear next step. So I've spoken about this before. If you leave a meeting with a comment which is something like, let me know what you think, that that is really weak, okay, because you've just given given away control. There's no momentum, there's no nothing. So a much better way to leave a meeting is to use a phrase, either this or something very much like it, to keep momentum. The next logical step is whatever that step is. Does that align? Um, I would even take that further, and often I would. I would ask specifically when would be a good time for me to follow up. So that may involve giving these people time to think about what we've discussed, maybe do more research. Some people operate that way. Uh, some people will make decisions straight away, but uh, depending on where you are, a lot of people won't. So you need to give them the space so they don't feel pressured by you, but equally, you need to make sure you keep that momentum going. So some people will need typically three meetings before they'll make a decision. That's the number of times convince a strategy, buying strategy, and other people genuinely need time, so it's really important that you uh respect how they operate, but you keep control. So if it's a period of time, then just have a chat to them about um well, like and obviously from my side, I want to follow this up. Would you like to do that? I mean, it's so it's Monday now. Um, would you like me to contact you before or after the weekend? Then you get their input, and then you are again working with them to define what the next step is, and and importantly, when that will happen, because you need to stay on top of it. So that's the first issue, no clear next step. Secondly, there's no timeline pressure. So this is really important, and one of the key things to remember is that in a lot of buying situations, and this is I'm gonna say this is more true for business to business, it's also true to a degree to business to consumer, but it does depend on what exactly what it is you're selling. But people won't take the time to talk to or some people won't take the time to talk to a salesperson until they're feeling sufficient pain, let's call it, to take action, which is to maybe get in touch with you if you haven't cold called them or um respond to an advertisement or whatever it might have been. So if they have come to you, that already tells you that they are in sufficient pain or discomfort about this situation that it's prompted them to action. So there is already momentum from their side, and what you really need to do is to make sure that you now build on that momentum and if you can add a little energy to it. So this is not to uh put them under a lot of pressure, but to maintain that momentum. So it's really important that you stay on top of things. So make sure you confirm decision timelines after a meeting or the end of the meeting, make sure you confirm those timelines, make sure you tie action to business consequences. So, again, this can be something along the lines of as soon as you get this installed, you'll you'll start seeing savings immediately, or you'll get whatever the benefit is. But maybe you need to remind them of that at the end of the meeting, depending on how that meeting went. But you need to make sure that that urgency is maintained and that that um and that that you're on top of the timelines as well. If things have moved, you really need to know. So find ways at the end of the meeting to just keep the timeline pressure on. The third issue is no stakeholder strategy. So, again, this is really important, and I've spoken about this before. But if you don't know who is influencing the sale, who could potentially block the sale, and who is signing off on the sale, then you will lose control after the meeting. It's really important that as much as you can, and I would say in most cases, you are talking directly to those people. And if you remember, what I was talking about earlier when I was talking about what happens after the meeting, one of the things that happens is the value is reinterpreted, the cost versus risk is reframed, it's reinterpreted. And if you're not there to stay on top of it, first of all, you don't know what the thinking is that's going on behind that, and secondly, you might miss out on miscommunications where you might feel that you've really clearly communicated everything, and this is a no-brainer on their side to make a decision, go for this deal, but on their side, something important has been missed out, and they're reframing things so that there's no longer such an urgent need, or you're no longer such a strong candidate to deliver the solution. So, a way to just check in on that again before the meeting ends is to ask how this conversation be positioned internally, or check in if you know who the stakeholders are, you can check in and see how each one, or at least from the people who are there, is each person still happy? Do they have any concerns? Just keep emptying out those potential areas of uh that are gonna derail the sale. Now, the fourth thing I'm gonna talk about is no written reinforcement, and again, this is really important. So, after a meeting, this to me is where email is really useful, and I don't know how you normally communicate with people. So, when I started out in sales, there wasn't email, so that dates me. Um, obviously, we've telephone people, but we didn't have SMS messaging, we didn't have any of that stuff. So, you might you would have a conversation on the phone, you do your qualification on the phone, then you go and have a meeting, and then everything would be done face to face, and then you would write up that meeting. Now, this is definitely going back before email. That would might even be a letter, so that's fine. But the important thing here is to make sure that you do document everything that's been discussed and that there is a written record, and the the beauty of email is it's time stamped, you can see you know who it's been sent to, and uh you've got evidence there if you if you need it. Um, that might be to just go back and confirm that you did actually send the key points to the people that you're communicating with, that they're again you can at the end you can ask for agreement on whatever the content of the email is. But and if you get that, then you've definitely um got a very clear definition of what was discussed, and that that has been agreed by the client. So the kind of things to follow up or to put into this is recap, and and you can do this verbally as well. I used to do this verbally and then write it up afterwards, but just recap on the agreed problems, restate what the um the quantified impact of those problems is, confirm what the next steps are moving forward, so that would be step and date, and maybe if somebody is responsible, note that down as well. Reinforce the urgency of getting things in place, and make sure that any remaining risks are flagged and identified, and that is what you are documenting, and that gives you a solid agenda to move forward on each time. So you might be quite happy doing that, you might be doing it already, you might not be doing that. If you're not doing it, I really recommend that you do. And it the other thing about it, it's uh in my opinion, it's it's a much more professional approach. And remember, we want to be dealing, or as buyers, buyers want to be dealing with people who are professional and deliver what they say they're going to say when they deliver it. So you need to be um really staying on top of your game here. So don't just at the end of the meeting give a generic thanks for your time, produce an email, you can call it what you like, strategic reinforcement document, um, minutes of the meeting, just so that everyone has a record, whatever it might be. And I think the depending on what the business that you're in, but certainly if you're dealing with governments, for example, and you could be dealing with some really big deals as well, anything like that, I would absolutely make sure that that was done. This is really, really important to do that. So, those were the four things that are predictable failure points. So, what can we do? So, let's just jump into a basic framework that you can use as a top-performing salesperson, which I hope you, if you're not at the moment, you certainly will be. So, you really want a clear model here, and that's what I'm going to give you. So, the first one is same-day reinforcement. So, this is what I've been talking about just now. So, you've got a summary of the key outcomes, you've got objectives are clarified, the business impact has been restated, and the agreed actions are documented. So, that's in terms of agreed actions, obviously, what they are, who's responsible, when they're going to be completed, and that's really important. And ideally, one of those agreed actions will be the next meeting of some form, because there needs to be that follow-up meeting. And what I used to, my preferred way of doing this would be to again sit in the days of paper diaries, but sit there with my diary out and just sit down with them and say, Okay, can we get that in the diary and just book it in? It's also actually really helpful doing that if you're trying to keep your visit numbers up, if you just book uh follow-up meetings with people while you're with them. That's just a great way of getting your diary done, but that's an aside. Okay, the next thing is to just anchor the excuse me, anchor the momentum. So when you finish your emails, don't leave it open-ended, always finish with something along the lines of to maintain progress towards whatever the outcome is. The next step is that whatever that might be, we will be meeting, or whoever will be meeting at wherever on you know, date and time. Um, and maybe a brief agenda of what that will cover. So the the main outcomes of that meeting or the main um the reason for that meeting to take place. But you need to restate what's happening next because that maintains momentum, it keeps it documented so everyone's in the loop, and you keep keep things moving forward. Now, the third thing to do here is to have that internal conversation influence discussion that I mentioned earlier, which is basically to ask how will this be positioned internally? So, what you're doing there is just getting hopefully an insight from the people in the room, the people who are driving the sale or the purchase from their side, but the people who are driving the purchase from the buyer's side, um they will let you know exactly how that's progressing. And again, keep a note of that. It may or may not be worth documenting, but aside from emails, I would always like to keep um client contact notes in the CRM. So I know, and it's not so you don't need to write a book about this every time, but just make sure you have bullet points with the key things that are happening. And the reason, again, for doing that, if you're not already doing it, first of all, I used to find because I'd generally be working on quite a few deals, is that it made it very easy for me to jump back into that deal and where it was and just keep updating the CRM with progress. So I knew exactly where it was, and then if for any reason anybody else needs to step in because you're not available for whatever the reason might be, they are they can get fully brief very quickly just by looking at the record. So this also is really important. Okay, so the next step here, or the final step on these actions to um to take on yourself, is just the the micro commitment tracking. So remember another important thing to do with moving deals forwards is to keep getting um small commitments and agreements, and there is there's a couple of reasons for doing this. One of them, it keeps the momentum going and it keeps things very clear about what's going on and everyone's in agreement, all that kind of thing. Secondly, though, the way our brains work is that our brains don't like to make decisions because it burns a lot of energy, and our brains, one thing our brains like to do is run very efficiently and not use so much energy, and um, I can certainly testify that to that with some of the people I know, but I'm not gonna go there. So the thing is though, once someone has made a decision, they will tend to stick with it because to review it and reevaluate it takes mental energy, and so joking aside, this is why it's really important to start getting yeses from people early on. You get these very small commitments, and every one of them starts stacking up the yeses in your favor, and what it's doing is it's getting their brains deeper and deeper into going with you as the solution to their problem. So getting these um micro commitments are really important. So, and this is just things like getting the dates, getting the owners of actions, it's getting the deliverables clear, but getting agreement each time on everything. So you don't again don't overdo it, but it keeps things precise, everyone knows what's going on, they it eliminates the chance of confusion, but also psychologically, you are guiding the buyer down this channel which leads towards them placing an order with you. Okay, so um what's the psychology behind doing all of this at the end of the meeting and after the meeting? The thing is that after meetings, cognitive bias kicks in. So, what's cognitive bias? Bias is basically where we are leaning towards one particular event or outcome, let's call it an outcome. And the cognitive part, basically, when you have a cognitive bias, what you're tending to do, and again, this is how your subconscious works, it's done in the subconscious, it will start to filter out things, facts, figures, whatever, that don't fit in with the bias that you have. So, in other words, once cognitive bias has cut has kicked in, that really needs to be in your favour because what people will start to forget. Let's let's say you messed up, let's say you messed something up, and um somebody got a bit sort of unhappy with you about something that happened, and that's kind of lead them towards excluding you. And what happens with cognitive bias is that they that's what they're gonna that's the picture they now have in their brain about you, and it doesn't really matter at that point what you do, it's then very hard for you to sway them back into being more neutral because what they'll tend to do is filter out any facts, any actions that you've done to correct things. So it is a real thing, and it's important to be aware of it. So once cognitive bias kicks in, it means risk aversion rises, budget fears grow, status quo tends to feel safer and easier, just staying with what they've got. So it's really important to understand that this stuff is going on. So, what again, top salespeople do is understand that this is what's happening and they'll anticipate it. So, what you are doing is you reduce uncertainty before it has a chance to really build up. So there's a saying here um, the deal is never as strong on Tuesday as it felt on Monday. So sometimes we can be really enthusiastic about something one day, but once we've had a chance to sleep on it, all that stuff kind of kicks in, and maybe the following day it's not quite so clear-cut. So it really is important that um you maintain momentum and that you do all you can to minimize those kind of issues um happening. So the final thing here is to just understand that with average salespeople, they basically hope strong meetings will close the deal, the strong meeting on its own. What you need to understand, and what the best salespeople understand, is that those strong meetings are really good, but you still need to engineer momentum once that's been completed. You still stay on top of it. It's like um the poorer performers will lift their foot off the gas because they feel it's all good. Top performing people keep their foot hard down till they're through the finish line, till they've got the order in their hand. And that really is, I think, the the best way of thinking about it. So I have a challenge for you, and that is that next time you're in a meeting, don't ask yourself how did it go? I mean, that's quite a valid question if you're self assessing, but the more important question, and I think longer term will have much greater impact, is to simply ask how will this move? How will this move things forward in your favour? Will it maintain momentum? Does it give you some protection against this sort of change of priorities, whatever, the fears that pop up once the meeting's gone? So the key, so just spend a couple of minutes thinking about that. The most important thing to take away from this podcast is that while meetings create opportunity, it's the momentum that creates the outcomes. It's really important to uh to understand that. Okay, so all of this, the momentum, the follow-ups, the stakeholder alignment, this only works if your basic foundation is really solid. And in the next episode, I'm gonna go back to the first step, in fact, which is discovery. Because if discovery is weak, and I've already spoken about this, the deal is already lost. So, what we're gonna do next time, so Monday, we're gonna go back to where every great deal begins, and we look at why shallow discovery leads to price pressure, price pressure, I should say, late stage objections, stall pipelines, and how the top salespeople uncover real impact, real urgency, and real consequences before they ever start talking about solutions. And this is really, really important. And um, this to me as well, I think the most important takeaway from this is once you change approach, and again, in the the um consultative selling course, I dive into this in a lot of detail and make it really, really clear. But this can be a complete change of approach for a lot of salespeople against how they've been taught to do it, and it just makes sales fun. Suddenly it gets a lot easier when you do it um in this way. So if you'd like cleaner closes, fewer surprises, and stronger leverage in every deal, join me on Monday and we will look at the final podcast in this um series of podcasts, which is just looking at what happens if discovery is weak, which we know is the deal is already lost, so how we handle that. So I hope you found that useful. Please give me a like and subscribe. Please share the podcast with colleagues or your manager or anybody else who you think might benefit from it. Um, and uh, you're always welcome to um uh buy me a coffee on the through the website as well. Okay, and um thank you for your time. I'll speak to you next time. Bye for now.