One of the competitors on my own list doesn’t have a website.
I keep a competitive landscape for Dynamic Agency OS the same way I build one for a client: a row per competitor, with what it does for the buyer, who it’s the best fit for, and the one word it owns. Most of the rows are coaches and advisors you’d probably recognize. One row is labeled Status Quo, and the box for what it does for the buyer reads, in the buyer’s own voice, “We’ll figure it out ourselves when we have time.” I gave it an owned word like every other row. The word is Later.
I can’t hand you a count from my own pipeline, because nobody sends an email saying they picked doing nothing. The best number anyone has comes from Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, who analyzed 2.5 million recorded sales calls for The JOLT Effect and found that between 40% and 60% of deals are lost to customer indecision.
You keep losing deals to the prospect who does nothing because doing nothing is a competitor that beats most agencies on trust, cost and risk, and the agencies that win those deals make saying yes feel as safe as waiting.
Quick Take
- The prospect who goes cold after a good call usually did pick a competitor. It just happens to be the one with no website and no invoice.
- Give the status quo its own row on your competitor list and rate it the way you’d rate a rival agency. It scores better than most owners expect.
- Most of its strength sits in the Commitment levers, economic model and risk reversal, and that’s the bucket most agencies leave empty.
- Re-pitching the problem to a buyer who already agrees there’s a problem tends to make them more nervous, and making the first step safer is what gets them moving.
In this article
- Why prospects choose to do nothing
- How to score the status quo as a competitor
- The levers doing nothing wins on
- Why pitching the problem harder backfires
- How to take the deal back
Why do prospects choose to do nothing?
Prospects choose to do nothing for one of two reasons, and they look identical from your side of the call. Some buyers aren’t convinced their current situation is a problem worth paying to fix. Others agree completely that it’s a problem and freeze anyway, because they’re afraid of buying the wrong fix. Dixon and McKenna put the difference neatly: beating the status quo is about “dialing up the fear of not purchasing,” and beating indecision is about “dialing down the fear of purchasing.”
In agency sales the second fear shows up constantly, because so many buyers have been burned before. In one market I mapped this summer, one documented owner had cycled through website managers for eight years. In another, the typical buyer had already watched two agency hires fail to deliver. Put yourself in that seat for a second. The next vendor looks a lot like the ninth year, and waiting starts to feel like the responsible thing to do.
If your deals stall in the days right after a great call, check for decision drag first, since that one’s usually about missing information and it’s the cheaper problem to solve. This post is about the buyer who has the information and still picks Later.
How do I score the status quo as a competitor?
Give it a row on your competitor list and fill it in exactly like you would for a rival agency. Write down the job it does for the buyer, who it’s the best fit for, the belief that keeps it alive, and what it owns.
My own row reads like this. The job: keep the agency running on referrals and the founder’s instincts without paying for outside advice. The best fit: founders whose referral pipeline is still full and whose weak positioning hasn’t cost them a deal yet, because the pain hasn’t compounded and doing nothing is still rational. The belief: “If I just work harder or get more leads, the growth and freedom will eventually come.” (Nobody admits to that belief on a sales call, and plenty of people run their business on it.)
Then rate it. When I rated the status quo on the 11 Differentiation Levers for two client markets in August, it came back Moderate on the same three levers in both: Relationship Capital, Economic Model and Risk Reversal. Moderate is the second rung on a four-step scale of Strong, Moderate, Weak and None. For an option with no sales team, no website and no pitch, that’s a strong showing.
One rule while you do this. Leave nothing blank. A blank cell means you haven’t looked, and a None means you looked and it has nothing there, and those lead to very different conclusions about where you can win.
Which levers does doing nothing win on?
Doing nothing wins on the three levers that decide whether a purchase feels safe: trust, cost and risk. Every one of them is something the buyer already has before you show up.
Relationship Capital. The buyer already trusts the current arrangement. That might be the vendor they’ve had for years, their own instincts, or a referral pipeline that’s still sort of working. You’re asking them to trust someone new, and the status quo never has to earn anything.
Economic Model. Doing nothing costs nothing on the invoice. The cost shows up anyway, it just never arrives as a bill. In my own row I put the price of waiting at another one to three years in the same loop, and not one dollar of that shows up on a statement anybody reads.
Risk Reversal. Waiting can’t fail in a way the buyer gets blamed for. After enough bad vendors, inertia reads as prudence.
Two of those three live in what I call the Commitment bucket, the levers that answer why it’s safe to buy, and in my own notes on the levers that’s the bucket where most agencies are completely empty. In one of those August markets, every rival agency we rated came back None on both Economic Model and Risk Reversal. The only option in the deal offering the buyer any commitment at all was the one where they don’t buy anything.
So the owners in that market had been comparing their case studies to other agencies’ case studies, while the competitor actually taking the deal was winning on terms nobody in the category was answering.
Why does pitching the problem harder backfire?
Pitching the problem harder backfires because the buyer who’s afraid of choosing wrong already agrees with you about the problem. Every extra slide proving how bad things are raises the stakes of the exact decision they’re scared of making.
It’s an easy reflex to fall into, and it comes from a good place. The prospect says “let us think about it,” you want to help, and the easiest help to reach for is walking them back through the pain. For the first kind of buyer, the one who isn’t convinced yet, that can work. For the second kind, you’ve just turned the fear up.
I wrote a list of how I think about positioning this summer, and one line from it applies directly: every lever you pull in positioning needs to reduce risk, because making it clear who you’re the best fit for makes the buying decision easier. A buyer leaning toward Later needs you to take risk off the table, and a deadline mostly gives them one more thing to be nervous about.
How do I win back a prospect who’s leaning toward doing nothing?
Answer the three levers the status quo is winning on, with the safest one first. An option that costs nothing and can’t fail won’t lose to a better description of your process, so each move below changes what saying yes looks like.
Take some of the risk. The strongest version I’ve seen came from a coach designing his own guarantee on a working session. He refused a money-back guarantee because it attracts people who want their money back more than the result. Instead he offered to work with the client personally until the system was running, as long as they completed the check-ins and implementations, and he added a 30-day parachute: an unhappy client in the first month simply doesn’t get the next invoice. That puts downside on the seller and still asks the buyer to do their part, and it answers “what if this goes like the last one” before the buyer has to ask.
Put a price on waiting. The status quo looks free until someone writes the cost next to it. Use the discovery call to find what the problem is costing them in their own numbers, then anchor your price to that problem and leave your hours out of it. A buyer comparing your fee to a cost they already carry is having a different conversation than one comparing your fee to zero.
Earn some trust before the proposal. The status quo gets trust for free because it’s familiar. Give the buyer a small first step they can judge you on, and a snap offer does this well. In one market I researched, my read was that a diagnostic showing an owner their competitors named in an AI answer, with their own business missing, would do more against waiting than any pitch, because inertia rarely breaks on an argument and often breaks on seeing something with your own eyes. Proof that doesn’t depend on a case study helps here too.
And when “we’ll think about it” does come, you want to be in the room. That’s one of the biggest reasons I push owners to deliver the proposal live, where you can hear which fear is talking and answer that one.
The Monday version: open your competitor list and add a row called Status Quo. Write the job it does for your buyer in the buyer’s own words, then rate it on the levers. If you already know the exact sentence your buyers say when they pick waiting, you’re further along than most owners I talk to, and you’ve just found the competitor you’ve been losing to. This is the kind of work that sits underneath agency positioning as a whole, and if you want help rating yours, we do this together inside the Dynamic Agency Community.
FAQ
What percentage of sales are lost to no decision?
Somewhere between 40% and 60%, according to The JOLT Effect’s analysis of 2.5 million recorded sales calls, also covered in Harvard Business Review. That’s B2B sales broadly. I haven’t seen an agency-only number I’d trust.
Is the status quo really a competitor?
Yes. It’s the option you’re compared against in nearly every deal, it does a job for the buyer, and it has strengths you can rate. Leave it off your competitor list and you’ll spend your positioning work beating agencies while the deal goes to Later.
How do I get a prospect off the fence without being pushy?
Make the yes smaller and safer. A shorter first commitment, a guarantee with clear terms the client has to meet to collect, or an easy exit in the first month all lower the fear of choosing wrong, and none of them needs a deadline or a discount.
Should I just follow up more?
Sometimes. If the buyer is missing information, a good follow-up with the right piece of content can restart the deal. If they have everything they need and they’re still waiting, another “just checking in” reminds them of the decision they’re avoiding. That’s the point to change what you’re offering them.
Why do prospects say they need to think about it?
Usually because thinking about it is the most respectable way to choose the status quo. Some of them need to see what staying put is costing them, and some already see it and are scared of getting the purchase wrong. Ask which one it is before you decide how to respond.