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All too often, a seller assumes that everything is going well in a deal until the prospect's response suddenly blindsides them: "Thank you for your time. We've chosen to move in a different direction."
It's quite normal for a B2B SaaS sales professional to juggle five to twenty deals at once, each with its own set of concerns, deadlines, and decision-makers. When things are moving fast, and sales professionals rely only on their notes, memory, and gut feeling to track risks, it's all too easy for sellers to overlook the warning signs.
Deal risks are warning signs that a deal is trending in a negative direction. If left unaddressed, they could lead to a loss of opportunity. Risks are situations with uncertainty. Each risk can be characterized by its likelihood and severity.
Sellers miss the warning signs for several reasons:
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In B2B sales, where decision cycles last anywhere from a couple of months to over a year, and multiple people influence the deal outcome, the risk signals or indicators tend to be more subtle than loud. It's all too easy for overly hurried, stressed-out, and/or less experienced salespeople to miss the warning signs.
While the occasional buyer may be generous in sharing about their decision-making process or brutally honest about their likes and dislikes, the average buyer is far less forthcoming with the vendor about their real concerns. Nor do they provide salespeople with all the organizational context and decision-making criteria they use to evaluate products.
Some buyers are simply too rushed to discuss things with a seller in detail, while others don't feel psychologically safe enough to share their honest feedback. Some prefer to drop hints of hesitation and skepticism rather than make outright declarations.
Experienced sellers know that it is their job to ask insightful questions to uncover the risks. This way, they can separate the addressable concerns from the real deal breakers and take mitigation steps while time is still on their side.
The list below shows examples of some common deal risks in B2B technology/services settings:
Lack of Business Priority Alignment: The buyer finds your product or solution valuable, but they have other more pressing business priorities demanding their attention. In their mind, your solution does not support their most urgent priorities. Thus, the decision can be postponed and revisited with no negative consequence.
Budget Missing: The buyer indicates that there isn't an approved, pre-allocated budget for your solution. The budget can be found, but it means that the seller needs to do work to help the buyer see their product as a key priority worthy of spending limited resources on and potentially build relationships with more senior stakeholders on the buying team.
Timing Misalignment: The buyer or buying team says they are "focused on other projects" or need to complete project X before they can devote proper attention to this.
Decision-making Process Unknown: The buyer does not know/ understand their internal process for making a new purchase and thus cannot successfully navigate through it.
Pricing or Terms Concerns: The buyer may oppose the proposed pricing, ask for "better terms to justify the investment," or say they're evaluating your competitors who have offered lower pricing. Alternatively, the buyer may show signs that they're confused by your pricing model or indicate that it does not align with how they would like to consume or extract value from your product.
Feature or Workflow Support Missing: The buyer seems impressed with many of your product features. However, your product lacks a specific system integration or does not support a desired workflow the buyer perceives as a "must-have."
Use Case Mismatch: The buyer comes across as dismissive towards your company's core differentiating features supporting its "flagship" use case(s). Meanwhile, they seem quite fixated on one or two product functionalities that are not your strengths.
Insufficient Buying Power (Lack of Executive Sponsorship): The primary point of contact in the buyer organization may love your product. However, they do not have the decision-making authority or influence to close the deal. The seller has not contacted more senior decision-makers.
Implementation Complexity The buying team expresses concern about the effort required to implement the solution. The team may not have the internal resources or expertise to do so and is looking to the vendor or a third-party consultant for assistance. The team may express concern about how long implementation would take and doubt whether they'd realize the value promised quickly enough.
Security, Privacy, and Compliance Concerns: There is uncertainty about whether the product under consideration will meet the company's legal/compliance/cybersecurity/data privacy requirements.
In addition to the fact that specific warning signals will be faint, sellers may be disincentivized from assessing risks accurately. Some organizations put a lot of pressure on sellers to make weekly progress on their deals – so reps feel obligated to report a rosy picture.
Human beings have imperfect recall and biases and are susceptible to faulty thinking. These flaws tend to get activated when people are in a hurry, stressed, tired, and overworked.
When deal risks are not correctly identified, understood, and mitigated by sellers, time is wasted chasing deals that will never close (poor-fit customers), confusion or frustration that effort isn't rewarded, drags in sales cycles, and delays in booking revenue. When frontline reps are inaccurate at forecasting, the team and organization as a whole are far more likely to miss their forecast.
To improve win rates more systematically, organizations need a system to help sellers receive risk signals, detect patterns early, and respond before the conditions for winning further decline.
Imagine if every seller had an advisor and coach highly skilled in detecting deal risks and identifying fit-for-purpose mitigation actions. The advisor possesses intimate historical knowledge of how deals were won and lost in your company in the past. It reviews every meeting recording and email exchange on each active deal – leaving no words unexamined – and can flag deal risks and suggest mitigation steps to reps as soon as risks emerge.
This scenario is no longer fiction. Here at Intersight, we've developed this capability and are excited to share it with our customers. Moving forward, every sales rep in Intersight will be able to access an AI Deal Risk Agent that analyzes deal activities continuously, identifies deal risks as they emerge, and suggests mitigation actions to users in near real-time.
Intersight's large-language-model-powered AI Deal Risk Agent can reason and make judgment calls about deal risk, much like an experienced sales leader. The difference is that the AI has perfect recall and is omniscient.
The AI Deal Risk Agent understands how deal risks can manifest in a B2B sales (including technology product sales and professional services sales) context. It has seen many different types of deal risks. Most importantly, it remembers every risk scenario it has seen before within your company (based on your organization's closed deals) and how each risk has been addressed or mitigated by your sellers.
Our AI Deal Risk Agent is a core part of the Intersight platform, which is connected to all your deal activities systems (CRM, conversation intelligence, and email). The agent runs passively in the background, scrutinizing every buyer/seller interaction and analyzing the content of all CRM field updates as well as communication patterns (like email response time) for sentiment and signs of engagement.
The AI deal risk agent only warns a user when it detects a risk or multiple risks on a deal worthy of the seller's attention. A user does not need to search for a risk; it shows up clearly inside the Risks tab of each deal.
When the AI Deal Risk Agent surfaces a risk, it shows the following information:
For each flagged risk, you will see:
Every active deal also gets a severity score, a single number that helps you understand how much risk is present overall. The severity score is based on the individual risks found in the deal and gives you a quick sense of how healthy the deal is.
All descriptions are in plain language and easy to understand.
Intersight’s risk detection system also learns from closed-won and closed-lost deals within your company under the hood. When you connect Intersight to your data sources (CRM, conversation intelligence tools, and email), the AI can "see" and learn from your historical deals and identify and catalog the risk signals that have occurred in those deals and the mitigation steps sellers attempted to respond to those risks.
You will not see that analysis directly, but the system is tracking the risk signals in closed won and lost deals and getting smarter and smarter over time about what matters and what does not. Intersight uses the learnings from closed deals to improve future recommendations, while the seller gets digestible, clear guidance.
With Intersight's AI Deal Risk Agent, sales reps gain an advisor that helps them spot the warning signs early and do something about them while there is still time. Sellers get clear, practical insights from their live deals; no extra work is required.
Book a demo with Intersight, and we'll set you up with a free trial.
Editor's note: Fatima Khan, Applied Scientist at Intersight, also contributed to this article.
