Three quarters of buying teams are fighting, and the vendor is almost never in the room when it happens.
That reframes what a stalled security deal actually is. The default vendor read on a silent evaluation is that a competitor won or budget moved. The more likely explanation is that two functions on the committee reached incompatible positions, nobody wanted to escalate it, and the purchase lost its slot on the roadmap without anyone recording a decision.
For a buyer, this is the single most actionable finding in the buying literature. If the base rate of internal conflict is 74%, then surfacing disagreement early is not a soft skill, it is the mechanism that keeps the evaluation from dying. The organizations that decide well are the ones that make the argument happen in week two rather than discovering it in month four.
Common questions
- Why do security deals stall without a clear reason?
- Usually because of internal disagreement rather than competitive loss. Gartner found that 74% of B2B buying teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision process. When two functions reach incompatible positions and nobody escalates, the purchase quietly loses priority and no one records a decision the vendor could learn from.
- How do you reduce conflict in a buying committee?
- Force the disagreement early. Name each function's actual objection in writing during the first fortnight of an evaluation, rather than discovering it after a proof of concept. Gartner found that buyers who experience buying-group relevance, meaning the process addressed their specific stake, are three times more likely to report a high-quality deal.
- Is disagreement inside a buying committee a bad sign?
- Not by itself. Gartner's 74% figure measures unhealthy conflict specifically, and open disagreement between functions with genuinely different exposure is how a committee does its job. The damaging pattern is unsurfaced disagreement, where two functions hold incompatible positions and neither escalates until the purchase has quietly lost its slot.
