The Anatomy of a Healthy Deal: Are You Missing the Hidden Signals?

In the B2B world, sales frameworks are widespread. Whether it's MEDDPICC, SPICED, or BANT, these systems give us a map to navigate the complex journey from prospect to customer. They help us ensure the right boxes are checked: we’ve identified a budget, we know the decision criteria, we have a timeline. On paper, the deal looks solid.

But then, the deal stalls. The follow-ups go unanswered. The champion who was so enthusiastic goes quiet. The forecast gets pushed to next quarter, then the quarter after.

Why?

Because a truly healthy deal is more than a completed checklist. It’s a living, breathing entity defined by the quality and momentum of its interactions. The most dangerous risks aren't the ones you fail to qualify; they're the ones buried deep in the conversational data that your framework can't see.

Based on our work with B2B revenue teams, we've found that the real health of a deal hinges on a few critical, complex, and often-overlooked factors.

#The Unresolved Question: Your Pipeline's Ticking Time Bomb

This is one of the most common and insidious deal killers we see: A prospect raises a valid question or concern in an early call, and the rep, focused on moving through their demo, provides a surface-level answer or tables it for later. The rep thinks everything is on track, but an unresolved seed of doubt has been planted within the prospect.

This creates a "consequential error" that is carried forward through the entire sales process – like in math exams in school, except that you don’t get points for the otherwise solution path but only for “Closed Won”. We've seen this happen in two ways:

• The Direct Unresolved Point: A prospect in a demo for a data platform might ask, "How do you handle GDPR compliance for EU data?" The rep gives a quick, general answer. An AI note-taking app might flag "follow up on GDPR," but if it's not immediately addressed with a detailed response or a follow-up with a security expert, that initial question festers into a major late-stage objection. The prospect, meanwhile, has been quietly evaluating competitors based on this single, unresolved criterion.
• The Indirect, Contextual Problem: This is even trickier. Imagine a prospect mentions in a first call that their "team is swamped with manual reporting." Two calls later, your company announces a new, higher pricing tier for advanced analytics. Separately, these facts are benign. Together, they create a critical new issue: is the value proposition still strong enough for a team that feels overworked and is now facing a higher price? A single-interaction perspective even from an AI note-taker can't spot this. Only by looking at the entire relationship holistically can you see how new information makes a past comment shine in a different, more dangerous light.

Companies struggle with this constantly. They're trying to fill data gaps while their own strategies, products, and pricing are evolving. A deal that looked "strong" last quarter might be at high risk this quarter based on a new company direction. True deal health requires constantly re-evaluating the entire relationship, not just the last interaction.

#Open Loops & The Myth of the "Just Checking In" Email

A congested pipeline filled with stalled deals is a classic symptom of ineffective open loop management. An "open loop" is any pending action, unanswered question, or unresolved issue. Ineffective teams manage these reactively: they send the mandatory follow-up after a call and respond when a customer asks a question.

But the moment a deal goes quiet – no response to an email, a missed follow-up meeting – the real work begins. This is where most sales processes break down. The default action becomes nagging the prospect with more "just checking in" emails, which quickly becomes annoying.

Healthy deals are managed differently: Top-performing reps understand that a silent deal isn't dead; it's an opportunity for a different kind of engagement. Instead of just "checking in," they send meaningful questions that re-engage the conversation or provide written answers to previously discussed challenges, demonstrating value even in the follow-up.

Timing is also crucial: A useful heuristic we've seen work is doubling the time between each follow-up (e.g., 3 days, then 6, then 12). This shows persistence without being desperate. Crucially, there must also be a clear "sunset" strategy – a defined point where a non-responsive deal is marked as "lost for now" and moved to a long-term nurturing sequence. This frees up critical sales capacity for active opportunities, increasing overall deal velocity while keeping effort at a healthy level.

#The Champion vs. The Economic Buyer: The Great Filter

This is the personal take, the insight I believe separates winning sales organizations from the rest. From what I’ve seen, the biggest problem most companies face is not a lack of interest, but the inability to get their conversation from a willing champion to the ultimate Economic Buyer.

Champions are often easy to talk to. They're the ones who feel the pain you solve most acutely and are excited about your solution. But unless they are absolutely convinced that they personally gain by making an introduction upwards – by saving face, by looking like a hero, by solving a problem that helps their own career – they will hesitate to spend their limited political capital to carry the conversation to the C-suite.

This is where most complex B2B deals stall, and reps are left wondering why. They had a great champion, the pain was real, the impact was clear. But they failed to answer the champion's unasked question: "What's in it for me to take the personal risk of bringing you to my boss?" A healthy deal requires not just a champion, but an empowered champion who sees a clear path to personal and professional victory by advocating for your solution.

#The AI-Driven Solution: From Checklists to True Clarity

So how do you track these nuanced, often hidden signals of deal health at scale?

Manually, it's nearly impossible. Reps are too busy, and RevOps leaders can't be in every conversation. This is where an AI intelligence layer becomes essential.

By analyzing all customer interactions – calls, emails, CRM notes – a system like Narratic AI can move beyond static framework checklists to provide a dynamic, living assessment of deal health. It can:

• Automatically surface unresolved questions and track if they've been addressed across multiple interactions.
• Identify stalled deals based on a lack of meaningful engagement and prompt reps with context-aware follow-up suggestions, not just generic "check-in" reminders.
• Analyze stakeholder engagement to flag when a champion is engaged but the conversation isn't moving up to the economic buyer, highlighting a critical risk.

A healthy deal is one where you have clarity – clarity on solved problems, clarity on next steps, and clarity on the true path to a decision. In today's complex sales environment, achieving that clarity requires going beyond the surface and analyzing the true signals hidden in your everyday customer conversations.

---

Connecting Deal Health to the Bigger Picture Understanding the true anatomy of a single deal is the critical first step. But how does this granular insight into deal health scale up to create a forecast you can actually trust?

This concept is a core component of our "Interaction-Driven Forecasting" methodology. To see how assessing individual deal health is the foundation for transforming your entire revenue engine, read our comprehensive guide: From Wish List to Win Plan: Connecting Your Sales Forecast to Your Next Best Action.