Why your best proposals are getting ghosted

I was on a sales coaching call recently with about 30 MSP sellers, breaking down their sales process step by step, when one of the reps laid out her approach:

"I run a network assessment, take the findings into a proposal call, and try to close."

Then she listed her problems: getting ghosted, low close rates, prospects starting the assessment and not finishing.

I knew exactly what was wrong before she finished sharing all the details.

She'd skipped the most fundamental part of a consultative sales process. She'd skipped discovery entirely — and replaced it with a technical report.

And if you're selling technical services of any kind, you may be doing the same thing.

Here's why this matters so much.

When you lead with a network assessment, you walk into a proposal armed with a list of problems. Vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, gaps in their security posture — all laid out in a nice report.

And you know the meaning behind every one of those problems. You understand the implications. You've seen what happens when those issues go unaddressed.

But your prospect doesn't.

Because you never sat down and asked them what they were actually experiencing. What symptoms they were feeling. What was keeping them up at night.

Problems are facts. Pain is feelings. And they motivate a buyer in completely different ways.

You can show someone a 47-page report full of red flags, and if none of those red flags connect to something they're already feeling, they're not going to pull out their checkbook. They're saying, "Let me think it over" — which, if you've been reading this newsletter, you know is an objection wearing a polite mask.

People don't pay to fix problems that aren't causing them pain. I don't care what the network assessment vendor told you when they sold you that tool.

When I’m coaching salespeople, the pattern I constantly see is this: a rep asks me how to handle a specific objection, or why deals keep stalling, or why a decision maker appeared out of nowhere at the eleventh hour.

And almost every time, when we trace it back? It was something missed in discovery.

The decision maker you didn't know about? Missed in discovery.

The deal that stalled and you can't figure out why? There was motivation or process context you never uncovered.

The prospect who went dark after a great presentation? You never understood what was actually driving urgency — because you didn't ask.

Discovery isn't just a step in the process. It's the foundation the entire deal sits on. Skip it, and everything downstream gets shakier.

When you run proper discovery before the assessment, the proposal conversation transforms.

Instead of walking in and saying, "Here are all the problems we found in your network," you're saying: "Remember those pains you told me about? The downtime that's costing you clients? The security concern that's keeping you from landing that compliance-heavy contract? Here's what's causing them — and here's how we fix it."

That's a completely different conversation.

You're not presenting a list of technical findings and hoping they connect the dots. You're connecting the dots for them because you took the time to understand their world first.

And beyond pain, proper discovery gives you everything else you need to close: who's making the decision, what the buying process looks like, what their timeline is, how price-sensitive they are, what's really going on with their current provider., and any other obstacles may derail the deal.

Without that context, you're walking into the most important meeting of the sales process missing half your toolkit.

If your current "discovery" is the network assessment, here's what you're skipping:

What pains are they actually experiencing, and how are those pains showing up as symptoms in the business? What's motivating them to look at this now? Who else is involved in making this decision? What does their buying process look like? What's their timeline? What's their relationship with their current provider — and is there anything complicated about it?

These aren't nice-to-haves. These are the things that determine whether your deal closes or dies.

If you're running assessments as your primary discovery tool, I'd challenge you to flip the sequence. Run a real discovery call first. Ask the strategic questions. Understand the human side of the buying decision.

Then run your assessment.

When you sit down for that proposal, you'll have the full picture — the technical findings and the context to make those findings matter. Your close rate will reflect it.

Adios,

Ray

PS — Drop any comments or questions you have on the post here and I’ll do my best to respond ASAP.