by David A. Saltzman
No one intends to make their company difficult to do business with. Yet a series of perfectly reasonable decisions often combine to create a completely avoidable sales loss. Each department solves the problem in front of it, but the customer experiences the cumulative result of those solutions.
While marketing provided valuable insights, legal implemented strict protections, operations introduced a detailed form, finance outlined the necessary qualifications, and leadership established an approval process. Although each decision was justified on its own, collectively they created significant hurdles, making the buying process more challenging—and potentially deterring customers.
From my experience, these sales losses stem from organizational patterns, not stupidity, laziness, or bad intentions. The decisions make sense locally, but they create silos that obscure the overall picture. The legal department sees risk. Operations sees errors. Finance sees margin. Marketing sees missing information. Each sees the benefit of its own decision, but no one sees the total burden placed on the prospect.
It’s like the story of several blind men who encounter an elephant. Each touches a different part. One feels the trunk and says it’s like a snake. Another touches a leg and insists it’s like a tree. Others describe a wall, a rope, or a spear. Each is partly right, but because none sees the whole elephant, the truth remains hidden.
Human beings are creatures programmed to do two things: survive and thrive.
To do so, we allocate energy, and if a task becomes too difficult, we move on. Two behavioral science concepts underscore this phenomenon.
The first is “processing fluency.” When an offer is difficult to understand or evaluate, that difficulty reduces confidence and skews judgments of trust, risk, and credibility. The second is “choice deferral.” When people cannot confidently determine which option is best, they often postpone the decision, making it the most attractive option. The company’s most dangerous competitor may not be another firm but the prospect who chooses not to decide at all.
If you make the decision too confusing – or create a decision path that feels like a bag of parts rather than a cohesive, easy-to-follow experience – your prospect’s amygdala – the “lizard brain” – sees a loss, not a gain. Since people universally fear losses twice as much as gains, they move on without taking action.
Every decision your company makes must answer this question: what does this decision make the customer think, feel, or do – and what happens when we add it to everything else we require? The simple fact is that if you confuse, you lose.
Consider a mid-market software company I worked with last year. A prospect who wanted to buy faced a sixty-day sales cycle for a product that should have taken six. The sales rep required three discovery calls before sending pricing. Procurement demanded a signed NDA before providing a security questionnaire. Finance required a purchase order before scheduling implementation, and implementation required a signed contract before assigning a project manager. Each requirement made sense in isolation—NDAs protect trade secrets, purchase orders protect cash flow, and signed contracts protect resources. But stacked together, they told the customer a story no one intended to tell: we do not trust you, and we are in no hurry to earn your business.
This is the trap of solving for the department instead of solving for the deal. No single stakeholder inside that company would have called their own step onerous. Each was defending against a real risk. But nobody was defending against the compounding effect, because no job title owns the customer’s cumulative experience. Sales owns the pipeline. Legal owns the contract. Finance owns the invoice. The customer owns the whole thing, and the customer is the only one keeping score.
The fix is not a new department, a chief experience officer, or another meeting. It is a habit: periodically walking the buying journey from the customer’s chair rather than the org chart and counting the steps, forms, approvals, and waiting periods a prospect must endure between “yes, I’m interested” and “yes, I’m a customer.” Most companies have never done this counting exercise because no single person experiences the whole path—only the customer does, and the customer rarely calls to complain before quietly moving on.
A few questions are worth asking at the leadership table, not at the department level. First, how many separate approvals, signatures, or handoffs does a prospect need to complete before becoming a customer, and would we tolerate that many steps if we were the buyer? Second, which of those steps address a real, named risk, and which exist simply because they always have? Third, who in the organization is accountable not for their piece of the process, but for the total time and effort the customer experiences from first contact to a signed deal?
None of this requires guessing at the customer’s state of mind.
It only requires tracking what already exists in the CRM and the calendar: the elapsed days between stages, the number of distinct people the prospect had to satisfy, and the number of times the prospect had to repeat information already provided. Those numbers, laid end to end, are the closest thing a company has to a photograph of its own reputation, as seen by a buyer. Most leadership teams have never looked at that photograph because it does not live in any single department’s dashboard. It lives in the gaps between dashboards, exactly where accumulated friction hides.
Answering those questions honestly is uncomfortable because it means admitting that a perfectly rational decision made in isolation can still be the wrong decision for the business. That discomfort is the price of seeing the whole elephant rather than just the part in front of you.
Stop looking for the culprit. Start looking for the accumulation. These losses are hard to see because they are created by capable people making sensible choices. The loss is unavoidable because no one examined the cumulative effect on the customer’s side.
In Part 3 of this 10-part series, we will explain how these sensible people suffer from something that makes these losses almost inevitable: the curse of knowing too much.
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