There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes with watching your sales team work hard and still not hit the number. They’re in the meetings. They’re doing the calls. They’re following the process. And yet the close rate stays inconsistent.
Your assumption, almost always, is that it’s a leads problem. That if you could just get in front of better buyers, the number would move. But that’s not it either.
The problem is actually somewhere most B2B tech businesses aren’t looking. And it’s costing them more than they realise.
This blog unpacks what’s actually going on, and what your sellers can start doing differently tomorrow.
According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, only 5% of B2B buyers are actively looking for a solution. The other 95% are living with a problem your solution could fix, but they just haven’t decided to do anything about it yet.
The chances are, your sellers are already sitting across from both groups every day. They know the 5% and the 95% are different conversations. What they don’t have is the knowledge or the tools to crack the second one.
Take the prospect who booked a meeting last week. They said yes to the conversation because something in the outreach nudged a frustration they recognised. Nothing urgent, just a low hum they’ve learned to live with.
They show up to the meeting genuinely open. Your seller runs their usual discovery. Asks about goals, challenges, current priorities. The prospect gives honest, reasonable answers. But the conversation stays on the surface. Because your seller’s questions were designed for someone who already knows they have a problem worth solving. Not someone who’s still deciding whether they do. So the meeting ends without further commitment. A follow-up gets sent. A week passes. Then two. Eventually, everyone chalks it up to a bad lead and moves on.
But the lead was never bad. The seller was simply missing the skill to unearth the latent need.
It’s a problem a buyer is carrying but hasn’t decided to act on yet. The problem is real. The cost is accumulating. But without someone helping them see it clearly, it stays exactly where it is. Unexamined and unresolved.
Think of the CTO who knows their team is losing time to a fragmented tech stack but hasn’t built a case to fix it. The sales director watching deals slip at the same stage every quarter but attributing it to market conditions. The CRO sitting on a compliance risk that hasn’t triggered an incident yet.
That’s the gap your sellers are walking past every single day.
And every time they miss it, the outcome is the same. The buyer leaves with the problem still buried beneath the surface. Nobody helped them connect the dots between the challenge they’re living with today and the consequences they’ll face tomorrow.
Multiply that across weeks, months, and quarters, and the impact is impossible to ignore. Pipeline growth stalls. Forecasts become unreliable. More budget gets poured into lead generation to solve what looks like a volume problem. Sales teams work harder, but results refuse to move.
And all the while, 95% of your market remains untouched.
If your sellers can help buyers recognise the cost of the problem they’re already living with, they’ll start converting them.
Getting a buyer there takes four steps, in the right order. Each one builds on the last, and together they move a buyer from carrying a problem quietly to deciding to act on it.
Scout
Before your seller offers anything, they need to find out what’s broken. That means leading with curiosity, not a pitch. Just listening for a problem worth solving.
A question as simple as “How are things going right now?” will do the job.
Probe
When a buyer makes a passing comment, mentions a frustration and quickly moves on, or describes a process as “fine, but not really,” you’ve found a thread worth pulling. Don’t let it go.
Most sellers take the surface answer and move on. But that comment is rarely the whole story. The deeper the buyer goes into it, the clearer the problem becomes. To both of you.
“How long has this been the case?” “Who else is it affecting?” “What does it make harder for the rest of the team?”
Make it tangible
Say the problem back out loud.
Most buyers can describe their problem. What they probably haven’t done is reckon with what it’s actually costing them. Summarise what you heard in their own words. This confirms your understanding and makes the prospect hear their own problem at full volume.
“So you’re losing weekends to manual reporting, the team is stretched, and the auditors have already flagged it. Did I get that right?”
Offer
Now, and only now, ask for the next meeting. Tied directly to the problem they just confirmed. At this stage the prospect feels the urgency. The meeting has a reason to exist before you even propose it.
“Given what you’ve described, would it be worth spending 20 minutes together to map out what solving this could look like?”
Once both of you can name the problem and what it’s costing, the buyer stops showing up for your sake. They show up because they need to.
Reading about the concept of latent need and uncovering it in a live sales conversation are two very different things.
That’s why training matters. Sellers need to know how to recognise latent need when it appears, how to explore it without forcing the conversation, and how to help buyers connect the problem to a meaningful reason to act.
That’s exactly what The Earning Curve delivers. It equips sellers to uncover latent need, create urgency where none existed before, and turn more of the market into active opportunities.
