Unblock stuck deals

You have deals in your pipeline that look fine until you ask, "when did we last actually talk to this customer?" Then it turns out it's been 17 days. This recipe is the weekly habit that surfaces those quietly-dying deals and rescues the salvageable ones.

20 minutes, once a week. Friday morning is the typical slot.

The scene

A deal sits in Negotiation at ₹4 lakh. Looks healthy on the dashboard. The rep says "the customer is thinking." Reality: nobody on your side has reached out in three weeks; the customer has quietly gone elsewhere. By the time anyone notices, the deal is gone.

The Sales agent watches this for you. Deals over 14 days without activity become a Red Flag automatically. This recipe is what to do when the flag fires.

The steps

1. Run the Stuck Deal Unblock Playbook

In chat:

Run the Stuck Deal Unblock Playbook.

(Or from Playbook → Templates → Stuck Deal Unblock → Run.)

The Playbook takes about 20 minutes of human time across an hour of elapsed time. It does the heavy lifting; you make the calls.

2. The Playbook's first step — show me the stuck deals

The Sales agent pulls every deal in Negotiation or Proposal with no activity in 14+ days. You'll see a table:

Tap a deal for the timeline. The agent will show you the last touchpoint — was it an email from you that went unanswered, or a "let me check internally" from them, or just radio silence?

3. Step two — categorise

For each deal, the Sales agent guesses why it's stuck and asks you to confirm:

• 💰 Price — customer's response references budget or price
• 📜 Legal — contract / paperwork is open
• 🏢 Internal sponsor lost — the person you were talking to went quiet (often a job change)
• 🥇 Competitor — they're talking to someone else
• ❓ Unknown — no clear signal

Click the right one. Or override and add a custom note.

4. Step three — draft re-engagement

For each deal where you said "yes, still worth chasing," the Sales agent drafts a re-engagement message in the customer's language and tone.

A deal stuck on price gets a different draft than a deal stuck on legal. The agent reads the deal history and writes accordingly.

You always preview before send. No message goes out without your tap.

A typical draft looks like:

Hi Rajesh,

I wanted to circle back on the proposal we sent on 21 April. We discussed the timeline — happy to look at deferring the start date by 30 days if that helps. Could we get on a quick 15-minute call this week?

Karthik

You can:

• Send — goes via email or WhatsApp depending on the customer's preferred channel
• Edit — tweak the wording, then send
• Cancel — leave the deal alone, no message

5. Step four — schedule the follow-up check

The Playbook automatically schedules itself to resume in 7 days to check whether anything moved. You don't have to remember.

Seven days later, the Playbook resumes:

• For deals that moved (status changed, new touchpoint, customer replied) → marks them resolved
• For deals that still haven't moved → suggests a different intervention (a call, a different stakeholder, or qualify the deal out)

The gotchas

Don't auto-send to everyone

The Playbook never auto-sends. Even when you've previewed 10 drafts and they all look fine, the Send button is per-message. This is deliberate — one badly-worded message to a real customer is more expensive than 10 minutes of clicking.

Qualifying out is a real action

Some deals are not worth re-engaging. The customer has clearly gone with someone else. The rep just won't say it. You can mark a deal Lost — qualify out with a reason. The Sales agent records the pattern and stops pestering you about it.

Don't run this twice in a week

If you run the Playbook every day, you'll spam the same customers. We have a 7-day cooldown built in — the Playbook refuses to re-message a customer who got the previous round less than a week ago. Trust the cooldown.

What it looks like a quarter in

Customers who run this Playbook weekly tend to report two things:

1. Pipeline shrinks in the first month — qualify-outs surface deals that were dead-but-listed. The number on the dashboard drops 15–25%.
2. Conversion rate rises in months 2–3 — the deals left in the pipeline are the real ones, and the re-engagement messages catch 30–40% of the slowly-dying-but-still-alive segment.

The trade-off is real and intentional. You don't have a "pipeline of comfort." You have a pipeline of actually-active deals.

What's next

• Forecast next quarter — once the pipeline is real, forecasting becomes credible
• Assign leads to your team — the upstream that decides which deals you'll be unblocking later
• Reference → Sales scoring — how the Sales score moves when a deal is qualified out vs lost vs won