When Sales Opportunities Stall: What L&D Should Look For
A qualified opportunity has been sitting in the pipeline for weeks. The seller says the customer is interested, the right stakeholders are involved and the deal is moving forward — but the next step keeps getting pushed out. When this happens repeatedly, the instinct may be to address the problem with more sales training. But the real issue could be the assumptions sellers and managers are making about the opportunity. 74% of all sales opportunities stall, but only 22% of the time it’s because of the customer’s inability to act. What’s actually holding up the deal?
In this session, Steve Gielda, co-founder of Ignite Selling and co-author of “Ignite Your Sales Strategy”, and Christine Seymour, vice president at Siemens, will explore how challenging seller assumptions can reveal why opportunities stall. Attendees will learn how sharper coaching questions can strengthen critical thinking, uncover gaps in urgency, stakeholder influence and buying criteria, and help managers accelerate pipeline movement and improve sales forecasting. For L&D and sales enablement teams, that means learning to distinguish between a true skills gap and a pipeline problem rooted in weak coaching, missed process milestones or untested assumptions.
Attendees will learn how to:
- Identify the most common seller assumptions that cause qualified opportunities to stall.
- Use sharper coaching questions to test assumptions around urgency, stakeholder influence and buying criteria.
- Recognize where critical sales process milestones have been skipped, overlooked or insufficiently validated.
- Apply these insights to improve manager coaching, pipeline movement and sales forecast confidence.
Speakers
 | Steve Gielda, Managing Partner – Co-Founder, Ignite Selling Steve Gielda is Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Accelerator at Ignite Selling, where he helps organizations translate growth strategies into the sales behaviors required to execute them. With more than 30 years of experience in sales, sales leadership, and performance improvement, Steve has worked with organizations around the world to improve sales effectiveness, accelerate pipeline velocity, and drive measurable business outcomes. Steve began his career in field sales at Lanier Worldwide before joining Huthwaite, where he worked alongside Neil Rackham and helped organizations apply the principles of SPIN Selling. Today, Steve advises sales and enablement leaders on strategy execution, sales methodology, manager coaching, and complex opportunity development. He is also the author of Ignite Your Sales Strategy and a frequent speaker on improving sales execution and revenue performance. |
 | Christine Seymour, VP Sales Excellence, Siemens Christine Seymour is a senior sales and growth executive with more than 20 years of experience helping global organizations accelerate revenue, gain market share, and navigate complex business transformation. Throughout her career, Christine has led sales, business development, strategy, and commercial initiatives across industrial technology, software, energy, and smart infrastructure markets. Today, Christine is a sales leader with Siemens Smart Infrastructure, where she helps drive growth across a large and diverse sales organization serving the rapidly evolving buildings and infrastructure market. Her career also includes leadership roles with Honeywell and John Crane, where she helped organizations introduce new technologies, develop new business models, and strengthen customer value propositions. Christine is passionate about building high-performing teams, developing talent, and translating strategy into meaningful customer and business results. |