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Low Close Rates are a Symptom of Poor Discovery

Sean Finlay
January 20, 2025

Low close rates are a symptom, not the disease.

Too often, sales leader misdiagnose the problem, blaming reps for lack of follow-up, weak negotiation skills, or simply not hustling enough. It’s an easy scapegoat but it’s dead wrong. The real culprit is poor discovery.

Without solid discovery, your team is advancing deals based on assumptions instead of facts, pushing opportunities through the pipeline that have no business being in there. Which creates inflated pipelines, wasted resources, and close rates that barely hover above rock bottom.

Here’s the thing, most buyers don’t fully understand their problems. If your sales team isn’t uncovering the root causes and quantifying the impact of those problems you’re likely leaving money on the table. Deals stall, buyers go dark, and your team winds up chasing opportunities that never stood a chance of closing.

 

What causes Low Close Rates

Low close rates are the direct result of poor discovery.

Many sales teams and their leaders, mistakenly attribute low close rates to a lack of effort or inadequate follow up from their reps. However, the root issue lies in the failure to fully uncover and understand the buyer’s challenges. Without it, deals lack the alignment necessary to progress and close.

When discovery is insufficient, sales reps have a tendency to pitch solutions that do not address the core issues the buyer is facing. Buyers, unsure of the real impact of their problems, hesitate or default to no decision. The pipeline then fills with unqualified opportunities, creating an inaccurate and unreliable view of progress.

Think about it: how many deals in your pipeline right now are advancing because the rep “feels good” about it and not because they’ve confirmed the buyer has a pressing, well understood problem to solve?

 

The Consequences of Poor Discovery

When discovery is weak, the entire sales process suffers.

Unqualified opportunities flood the pipeline, creating a distorted view and undermining forecast accuracy. Deals that never should have advanced to later stages are counted as viable, leaving sales teams scrambling when they inevitably fail to close.

How often does your team spend time chasing deals that lack urgency, alignment, or a clear buyer problem? Those deals clog the pipeline and distract from high value opportunities.

Poor discovery creates low close rates and higher customer acquisition costs. Every dollar spent on unqualified opportunities is a dollar that could have been used to move a well defined, high probability, deal forward.

Additionally, buyers expect sales professionals to guide them toward solving critical business problems. When discovery is rushed or non existent, solutions are misaligned, and buyers see reps as product pushers. Nobody wants to deal with a product pusher.

 

Why Discovery Fails

Discovery often fails because sales teams approach it with the wrong mindset and tools.

The most common issue is a product-centric mentality. Reps are eager to pitch features and benefits assuming buyers can connect the dots between the product and what they’re trying to accomplish. This approach puts the responsibility on the buyer to figure out their needs and overlooks the fact that many buyers don’t fully understand what they’re trying to solve.

Too many sales organizations are relying on outdated qualification methods. Frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) focus on surface level criteria ignoring the deeper issues driving buyer decisions. This leads to pipelines filled with deals that meet basic criteria but lack a strong foundation of buyer urgency of alignment.

Many reps lack the skills or structure to conduct effective discovery. Without a defined process to uncover and quantify the buyer’s current state, future state, and the gap between the two discovery becomes shallow. The absence of a robust methodology or framework, like Gap Selling, makes it harder to identify the problems and impacts that are moving the buyer to consider a change.

 

Solving the Discovery Problem with Gap Selling

Fixing discovery requires a structured, buyer focused approach.

ASG’s Gap Selling methodology makes discovery a diagnostic process. It starts with identifying the buyer’s current state, their challenges, pain points, and underlying root causes. From it, it defines the desired future state, and quantifies the gap between where the buyer is today and where they need to be. This gap represents the value of solving the problem and creates the urgency to act.

A critical component of this approach is leveraging Buyer Input Data (B.I.D.). B.I.D. is the concrete insights directly from the buyer about the cost of inaction and the specific business problems they face. This data ensures the sales process is aligned with the buyer’s priorities and removes the guesswork that plagues traditional discovery.a promotional cover for "The Revenue S.P.E.E.D.™ Model," described as a sales and sales enablement guide to demonstrating meaningful impact. A bold red button in the center reads "FREE DOWNLOAD." The lower section shows a group of diverse, cheerful people celebrating, accompanied by overlayed elements like books and abstract icons, adding energy and creativity to the design.

The S.P.E.E.D. Model further strengthens discovery by structuring deal reviews around problem alignment and buyer urgency. By regularly assessing the quality of information in the pipeline, sales leaders can eliminate unqualified deals early and focus resources where they matter most.

With these tools, discovery becomes a collaborative process that positions sales teams as trusted advisors. By deeply understanding the buyer’s problems and demonstrating the value of solving them, teams can improve close rates, shorten sales cycles, and increase deal sizes.

 

Wrapping Up

Low close rates are not about effort, activity, or even market conditions. They’re about execution, specifically, they’re about the failure to conduct meaningful discovery.

When sales teams skip or rush discovery, they fail to understand the buyer’s problems, leading to misaligned solutions, stalled deals, and inflated pipelines. Buyers lose trust in reps who can’t clearly articulate their challenges and guide them toward a solution.

Discovery must be the corner stone of your sales process. Using frameworks like the Gap Selling method, every opportunity in your pipeline is driven by real buyer problems and urgency, not assumptions or hope.

If you’re needing to improve your close rates, start by improving how your reps handle discovery.

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