Sales are never a straight line. Even the best teams hit roadblocks, missed quotas, stalled deals, tough competition, and buyer indecision. Noah Loul, a sales leader known for practical strategies that work on the ground, breaks down six key actions you can take when things get tough.
These tips are based on years of hands-on experience and tested approaches that help sales professionals regain focus and drive results.
1. Focus on One Problem at a Time
When deals fall through or targets are missed, it’s easy to panic and try to fix everything at once. That never works. Noah Loul suggests narrowing your attention. Pick the one thing that’s causing the biggest drop, poor follow-ups, unclear messaging, or weak discovery. Fix that first.
For example, one sales team Noah worked with was struggling with low conversion rates. After reviewing their process, it turned out their follow-up emails lacked clear calls to action. A simple change, adding a question at the end of each message, boosted responses by 40%.
2. Ask Better Questions
Too many salespeople stick to surface-level questions during discovery. That leads to vague answers and missed opportunities. Dig deeper. Ask specific, open-ended questions that get prospects talking about pain points, not just features they want.
Noah encourages reps to stop asking, “What’s your budget?” and start asking, “What’s the cost of doing nothing?” One of his former clients, a B2B SaaS firm, doubled its pipeline quality by training reps to go beyond scripted questions and actually listen.
3. Take the Pressure Off the Close
When you push too hard at the close, you often lose the deal. People don’t like being backed into a corner. Noah Loul recommends shifting the tone. Make it about helping, not pushing.
He tells the story of a rep who kept missing quota despite hitting all the steps. After reviewing her calls, Noah noticed she was rushing through objections and jumping straight to the contract. They changed her approach to include a 10-minute “decision workshop,” where the rep helped the client think through pros and cons. Her close rate jumped by 25%.
4. Shorten Your Sales Cycle with Micro-Commitments
Long sales cycles kill momentum. To keep things moving, Noah suggests breaking the process into small, easy steps. Instead of asking for a big commitment upfront, get a series of small “yes” responses.
For example, one of Noah’s clients in the medical equipment space used to send full contracts after one demo. Now they ask for a short feedback call first. That single shift cut their average cycle time by two weeks.
5. Don’t Rely on Just One Contact
Putting all your trust in one champion is risky. People leave companies. Budgets get cut. Noah Loul advises building at least three relationships inside every target account. This spreads out risk and gives you more angles into the deal.
In one case, a deal was about to fall apart after the main contact stopped responding. Because the rep had also looped in an operations manager and a finance lead, the conversation stayed alive and closed three weeks later.
6. Review Your Losses Like You Review Wins
Most sales teams celebrate wins and move on from losses without learning much. That’s a mistake. You can learn more from a lost deal than a closed one—if you take the time to unpack what went wrong.
Noah built a simple “Loss Review Checklist” that reps fill out after every deal that doesn’t close. It includes questions like: Did we miss a key stakeholder? Were the pain points clear? Did we follow the timeline? Over time, these insights helped one team increase win rates by 18% in just three quarters.
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