Are You Here to Buy a Car?

A few years ago, while I was at Salesforce, I had dinner in Casablanca with Monsieur Laraki, President of the Toyota and Lexus dealerships for all of Morocco. Over the meal he told me about a saleswoman in one of his Casablanca showrooms. She was outselling the next best person on the floor two to one, and he wanted to know why, so he went to watch her himself.

When a customer walked in, she asked one question. "Are you here to buy a car?"

If they were browsing, or wanted a brochure, she introduced them to a colleague, politely and straight away, and turned back to the door.

I told him that sounded like a poor first experience for the customer. He agreed. Then he explained why it worked. She never spent an hour with someone who had no budget and no intent to buy, so that hour was always free for the person who did. The closed deals kept landing with her.

I've thought about that conversation more than almost any sales training I've sat through.

Time is the only thing a seller invests

A seller has no budget to spend on a pipeline. They have hours. Every discovery call, demo, proposal and internal deal review draws on the same account, and it never refills. An hour spent on a buyer who was never going to buy is an hour taken from one who was.

The research points the same way. In Ebsta and Pavilion's 2024 benchmark, covering 4.2 million opportunities across 530 companies, top performers were 366% more likely to close an opportunity out at the discovery stage. Ebsta's own reading is that they disqualify early instead of creating opportunities in hope, "ensuring their time is not wasted on businesses that are never going to close." The 2025 edition found the pattern again. Top performers were 24% more likely to disqualify deals outside their ideal customer profile early, while low performers' deals were 217% more likely to slip at a late stage.

The most useful evidence, for me, comes from outside the vendor world. A team from Cornell, Harvard Business School and Columbia studied 11,627 outbound sales calls at a large European telecoms firm and built a model that tells a seller when a conversation has stopped going anywhere. It cut the time spent on failed calls by 54% while keeping nearly all the sales. Reinvesting that time in fresh calls lifted expected sales by up to 37%. That is a modelled estimate, in high-volume selling with plenty of leads, and the authors are careful to say so. But the mechanism is the one the saleswoman in Casablanca understood. The hour you don't spend on the wrong buyer is the hour you get to spend on the right one.

Why we hold on

If the logic is this plain, why do so many of us carry deals we know are going nowhere?

Partly because an open opportunity feels like an asset. It sits in the forecast, it counts towards coverage, and it gives us something to talk about on Monday. Partly because we came into this work to help people, and telling someone "this isn't the right time" feels like closing a door in their face. And partly because the system rewards it. Pipeline coverage targets and activity dashboards make "maybe" free and make "no" look like failure.

That is what happens when sensible people work inside incentives that pay for volume. If we want different behaviour, the fix sits with the system before it sits with the seller.

Disqualifying is routing

The part of the story I didn't fully get until Monsieur Laraki spelled it out for me was the colleague. The saleswoman didn't turn the browsers away. She handed them on. The customer who wanted a brochure got a brochure, from someone whose job it was that afternoon.

That is what makes disqualification work in a B2B team. If you're measured on closed-won, your job is to decide who earns your selling time. Nurture and brand building matter enormously, and they belong to the teams built to do them well. Handing a lead back to marketing with a clear note on why, and on what would bring them back, is good service to the buyer and to the business.

In practice, every opportunity sits in one of three situations.

Poor fit. The evidence says you can't solve their problem economically, or they can't buy. Exit cleanly, and tell them why.

Right customer, no buying process. They fit the profile, but there's no project, budget or deadline. Route them to nurture with a defined trigger for re-engagement, and keep them out of the forecast.

Credible buyer with real obstacles. A decision is being made, and it's messy. Stay and do the work.

That third situation matters, because disqualification can be overdone. Gartner found that 74% of B2B buying teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision, and that groups which reach consensus are 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal. Gong's analysis of 1.8 million deals closed in 2024 found that the deals which closed had twice as many buyer contacts as those that didn't. Difficult buying is often what real buying looks like. A tangled committee is a reason to investigate, and to help them untangle it.

So the better question is whether this buyer is making progress towards a decision, and what new evidence earns your next hour.

Thinning the seedlings

Gardeners thin seedlings early. The ones they pull may be perfectly healthy. The ones left need the light, the water and the room, and a crowded tray grows nothing to full height. A pipeline behaves the same way. Thinning it early is what gives the real opportunities room to grow.

What I'd ask a sales leader to change

Ask what new buyer evidence justifies the next investment of time, at every stage and well beyond the first meeting. Ebsta's own analysis suggests top sellers tighten their criteria as deals mature.

Make the exit as cheap as the maybe. Part of why weak deals linger is admin: updating the opportunity, writing the handback note, telling marketing, setting a date to look again. An AI agent working inside your CRM can now do all of that in seconds. The seller makes the call. The agent does the paperwork.

Recognise a well-made exit in the same breath as a win. If closed-won is the only outcome anyone celebrates, people will keep deals alive to avoid the other conversation.

Measure what disqualification is meant to protect: selling hours spent on eventual losses, time to identify a poor-fit deal, late-stage slippage, and revenue per seller.

And watch the ratio. Take fifty weak deals out of a hundred and a 20% win rate becomes 40% without a single extra sale. Disqualification has to show up in output as well as in the percentages, so never set the number of rejected opportunities as a target.

The one question

The research here is observational. Better sellers may disqualify more because they are better, and a good territory makes everything easier. I hold that lightly. But every dataset I've looked at, and every high performer I've worked alongside, tells the same story as a saleswoman in a Casablanca showroom. She asked one question, and she was willing to act on the answer.

What's your version of "are you here to buy a car?", and does your team feel safe asking it?

I'm always happy to talk.

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Sources: Ebsta and Pavilion, B2B Sales Benchmarks 2024 and GTM Benchmarks 2025; Manzoor, Ascarza and Netzer, Learning When to Quit in Sales Conversations (2025); Gartner, May 2025; Gong, April 2025. Full references in the downloadable brief.