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There's a number from behavioral research on B2B purchasing that sits in the back of my mind when meeting with deal teams.
40%.
That's the floor on the share of qualified B2B opportunities that end in no decision, based on analysis of 2.5 million recorded sales calls by the JOLT Effect research team. The actual range across organizations runs 40 to 60%. Deals that met the qualification bar and then stalled out in the pipeline until the window closed.
The second layer of that finding is what most origination leaders miss.
Of those no-decision outcomes, 56% trace back to fear of making the wrong move. Less than half trace back to a preference for the status quo. Stalled deals are a function of buyer anxiety more than buyer contentment.
Port that into origination and a pattern falls into place.
The Practice That Should Have Been a Conversation
Every origination team has a file that should have been a call.
Right market. Right size. Right specialty. The name made it through the scrub. The profile got built. Someone put the practice on a call sheet.
Then the file sat.
Eight months later the practice transacted with someone else. The post-mortem lands the same way every time: we had them on the list, we knew the fit, we just never got around to the outreach.
The sourcing worked. The name got sourced, the profile got built, the fit got identified. What was missing was conviction. The origination lead needed a specific signal to move the target from "on the list" to "call this week." That signal wasn’t in the profile.
Why Conviction Isn't in the Profile
Most origination profiles are built to answer one question: is this practice a fit.
Specialty alignment, provider count, geographic overlap with the thesis, rough financial profile, obvious red flags. That's a qualification framework. Necessary work. Wrong layer for timing.
Conviction lives in a different layer: is this practice a fit today, or in 18 months, or never. The conviction layer is built from trigger signals - what's happening around the founder right now that makes a conversation this quarter more useful than a conversation later. Founder age combined with graduation year combined with lease renewal timing combined with recent adjacent auction activity combined with partnership dissolution filings combined with local payer dynamics.
Those signals exist. They sit in public data most origination teams don't pull because pulling them isn't what the filter does (and it’s not easy).
The result is that every team carries a pipeline of qualified-but-not-convicted targets. Some are ready now. Some won't be ready for three years. Without the conviction layer, every target looks the same on the call sheet, and the MD ends up prioritizing the ones whose names they recognize over the ones whose timing is hot.
That's where the 40% floor comes from. The fear-of-the-wrong-move the JOLT research identifies in buyers is the same fear an origination lead feels when the call sheet has 200 equally qualified names and no timing signal to choose between them. The list is too flat to act on, so action gets deferred.
What Conviction Looks Like in Practice
Based on what I've seen across origination workflows this year, the teams that close the indecision gap have one thing in common: they've separated the qualification pass from the conviction pass.
The qualification pass is broad. It runs on a filter and produces a long list. We all know these lists very well (cough cough licensed databases).
The conviction pass is narrow. It runs on trigger signals and produces a short list of 8 to 15 practices ranked by timing - which ones have the highest probability of being in a decision window inside the next 90 days.
The MDs who operate that way work the top of the conviction list every week, and the list refreshes as trigger signals change. The indecision rate drops because the team no longer carries the weight of deciding between 200 equally qualified targets. The conviction pass decides for them.
I'm not going to walk through the specific trigger model I use. That's the work product.
What I will say is that building the conviction layer is less a data problem than a time problem. The signals live in public sources - NPI registry, state license databases, court and county records, real-estate filings, practice website audits. The challenge is that no BD team I've talked to has 40 spare hours a month to maintain that layer at the cadence the signals require.
The Question for This Week
If your team is working from a list that hasn't been re-ranked against trigger signals in the last 30 days, the 40% no-decision rate is a floor.
Re-ranking the names already in the pipeline against live trigger signals is what moves the number.
Reply with the market and specialty you're currently sourcing, and I'll tell you what public data signals are active in that market this week that your team probably isn't tracking.
-Shawn
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What's the oldest name on your current pipeline that nobody has called yet? Hit reply.
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This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, or financial advice.