By Marcel Hollaar, Founder Reppic | VP Sales, CCO, and international sales trainer | May 13, 2026
“We have discussed your proposal, but unfortunately, the price does not fit within our budget.”
Every sales manager and CCO in B2B sales knows this message. It arrives via email. Sometimes via the salesperson returning from follow-up attempts. Sometimes after weeks of silence.
And almost everyone knows deep down that it isn’t true.
Price is rarely the real reason why a deal falls through in complex B2B. That is not a bold statement — it is an insight that most commercial directors confirm when you ask them. They have experienced it themselves as salespeople. They see it in their team. They know something else is at play.
The problem is not the insight. The problem is that they cannot put their finger on it.
Because the real reason isn’t in the rejection of the proposal. It happened weeks earlier. In a conversation with a member of the DMU that didn’t go well. In an objection that was cut off and never truly resolved. In a question from the technical director that was half-answered when he expected a concrete response. In a signal from the buyer that was missed because the salesperson was already moving on to their next point.
By the time the rejection arrives, the decision has long been made. A long time ago. In a conversation whose content has vanished.
As VP Sales and CCO, I have spent decades in this gap. You know — based on experience and intuition — that your team is missing objections. That salespeople are moving too superficially through the DMU. That deals are lost at a moment that is long past by the time the rejection comes in.
But you cannot prove it. You cannot manage it. You cannot coach your team on it because you have no concrete examples. You only have suspicions.
And suspicions are not actionable data.
What a commercial director needs is not confirmation of what he already suspects. He needs insight. Concrete, repeatable patterns from real customer conversations that show what is actually happening — not what salespeople report is happening.
onderzoek van Gartner toont aan dat in complexe B2B-deals gemiddeld 6,8 beslissers betrokken zijn URL: https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey
In complex B2B processes with multiple rounds of talks, extensive DMUs, and sales cycles of three to twelve months, an enormous amount of conversational content disappears. What remains in the CRM are status updates, revenue forecasts, and ultimately a loss reason.
Conversation analysis shows what was actually happening between those status updates.
Take an anonymous example. A B2B organization with complex deals and an average sales cycle of six months. Loss ratio: 58%. Most cited reason: “budget” or “price.”
After analyzing lost trajectories with Reppic, one pattern consistently emerges: in the majority of lost deals, a technical or organizational question was asked in an early conversation by a DMU member who was not the primary contact. The salesperson gave a general answer and then focused back on their main contact. The question was not followed up on.
That DMU member — often the ultimate blocker or a crucial influencer — left the conversation without a satisfying answer. That unresolved objection was never addressed by the salesperson. Weeks later, during the proposal evaluation, it factored into the decision. Not as an explicit argument — but as a gut feeling that the solution just didn’t quite fit.
The rejection read: “The price does not fit within our budget.”
The real reason: an unresolved objection from a DMU member that the salesperson hadn’t even recognized as such.
As a commercial director, you manage by outcomes — conversion ratios, loss ratios, average deal size. But outcomes are the result of what happens in conversations, early in the process. If you don’t know what is happening in those conversations, you are managing symptoms instead of causes.
“Too expensive” is a symptom. The unresolved objection from the technical director in the third conversation is the cause. The lack of an answer that the buyer could defend internally is the cause. The salesperson who served their main contact perfectly but ignored the rest of the DMU is the cause.
Once you know those causes, everything changes.
You know what your sales managers need to coach on — not in general, but specifically, based on patterns from their own team’s real conversations. You know which objections your value proposition structurally fails to answer convincingly. You know which DMU members are structurally receiving too little attention in sales processes.
This is the difference between managing by suspicion and managing by evidence.
The organization in the example acted on the insights Reppic provided. Sales managers began targeted coaching on recognizing and fully addressing questions from non-primary DMU members. Salespeople learned to systematically check which objections were still lingering internally after each conversation — and how to address them before sending the proposal.
No new sales method. No new training. Just managing what is actually happening in conversations — instead of what salespeople report is happening.
You already know that “too expensive” is not the real reason. You knew that before you read this article.
The question is: do you know what the real reason actually is?
Not as a feeling or suspicion. But as a concrete, repeatable pattern that you can show to your sales managers, translate into targeted coaching, and use to structurally improve your sales processes.
If the answer is no — then you already have the information you need in-house. In the conversations your team has every day with real customers, early in the process.
You just need a way to listen to it.
Marcel Hollaar is the founder of Reppic — the conversation intelligence platform that provides qualitative insights into sales conversations for salespeople, sales managers, and commercial directors. With thirty years of experience as VP Sales, CCO, and international sales trainer, he combines practical knowledge with AI technology.
Want to know more about how Reppic makes the real causes of lost deals visible? Check out the conversation analysis module or book a demo.
