Why the Deal Stalls After the Yes

Your champion said yes. The pilot worked. The engineering team validated the results. Every signal says you have product-market fit. Then procurement calls. Legal has questions. The VP of operations wants to know who is responsible if this thing breaks something that cannot be broken.

The person who loved your product cannot protect you from the people who have to approve it.

This is a pattern Michael Dolbec has watched repeat from the board seat for more than 30 years. As Managing Partner at Momenta Ventures, one of the leading venture capital firms focused on industrial AI and deep tech, Michael sits on multiple boards of companies building AI products that control mission-critical operations. He has also been a founder: he co-founded Omnisky during the internet boom, took it through an IPO, and sold it. He has seen this problem from every angle.

In this episode of Why Growth Stops, Michael and I broke down why technically strong companies win pilots and lose deals, and what founders selling complex B2B products need to understand about the full buying landscape before their cash runway runs out.

Why the Deal Stalls at the Pilot Finish Line

Most founders treat a successful pilot as proof of product-market fit. Michael's view from the board seat is less optimistic. When a portfolio company tells him the pilot succeeded, his first question is whether they have been socializing the next steps with the customer throughout the process.

Because if they have not, they are about to discover that the pilot only tested one thing: whether the product works. It did not test whether the organization can buy it. Those are two completely different processes.

The expectation that money flows after the pilot succeeds is, in Michael's words, "very rare." What actually happens is a cascade of stakeholders the founder never planned for. Procurement wants the best price on their terms, not yours. Legal wants to make sure everything is your fault and nothing is theirs. The operations leader who has to put the product into production worries about what happens when something goes wrong.

And then there is the attribution problem. Sometimes the pilot succeeds so dramatically that internal politics kick in. Someone who did not champion your product does not want you to get full credit for the improvement. The more subjective the results, the more room there is for people to slow the sales cycle down.

The worst case, Michael told me, is when the founder did not socialize any of these issues upfront. "Then they're surprised, and it adds another month or two, or three or more to the sales cycle, which can be fatal if you haven't done your cash planning with that in mind."

Five Buyers, One Pitch: The Root of the Problem

When I asked Michael how many people typically need to say yes before a contract gets signed, he started listing roles. CEO. CIO. Chief Digital Officer. CISO. The head of operations, the person who, as Michael put it, "will get fired if you stop making the widgets." Legal. Sourcing. Sometimes different branches of legal for different concerns.

That is not one buyer. That is an entire decision ecosystem. And most founders have built their product, their pitch, and their sales process for exactly one person in that ecosystem: the technical champion who ran the pilot. The deal stalls in procurement because the founder never built for the person who controls the purchase terms.

The problem gets sharper when you look at the tension between IT and OT (operational technology) organizations. The IT leader evaluates total cost of ownership, infrastructure impact, and whether this new product introduces problems elsewhere in the stack. The operations leader evaluates whether this product threatens uptime, safety, or production targets. They have different motivations, different risk profiles, and different veto power.

Michael's advice is direct: do not count on one side convincing the other. Sell everyone in parallel. The executive sponsor needs to hear strategic value. The operations leader needs to hear safety and continuity. Procurement needs to hear unit economics and terms. Legal needs to hear governance and liability protections. These are not objections to overcome in a late-stage negotiation. They are buyers to build for from the beginning.

They Are Not Buying Your Product. They Are Buying Peace of Mind.

Inside Momenta's partnership, Michael told me, they often joke that the biggest industrial OEMs sell physical things and software, but what they really sell is peace of mind. As a startup, it is very difficult to sell any peace of mind. But you have to.

This reframes the entire competitive landscape. If your buyer's primary concern is operational continuity, and your pitch is about innovation and ROI, you are having the wrong conversation. The founder is selling features. The buyer is purchasing a security blanket.

Part of the solution, according to Michael, is transparency about what could go wrong. Founders who talk about potential risks upfront, who show they have thought about governance, about what happens when the system makes a mistake, about how to audit and monitor behavior, build trust faster than founders who pretend the risks do not exist.

This is especially true for AI products. Michael described a growing challenge around delegated authority: when an AI agent controls mission-critical operations, who is responsible when something goes wrong? Insurance carriers are already responding. Michael mentioned reading that some carriers are removing indemnity clauses for certain AI software because they cannot underwrite the risk of probabilistic systems.

For founders building AI products, this is not a hypothetical. It is a deal-blocker that is emerging right now.

Your Channel Partner Opens the Door. You Still Have to Close It.

Many founders think that having a channel partner solves the go-to-market problem. Michael described the gap between what startups sell (a technically superior product that does something better) and what channel partners sell (a security blanket wrapped around a bundle of services).

The good part about channel partners is that they shorten the path to the customer. The bad part is that they sit between you and the customer, filtering the signal. You miss the intimate conversations about what other problems the customer has. You miss the early sensing that tells you which subsegment to focus on, which rough edges to smooth, and which features to prioritize.

The ideal channel partner, in Michael's framing, is an extension of your company and your priorities. The worst one gives you nothing more than "I tried to take an order and they didn't give it to me."

For founders in the customer discovery phase, this distinction matters. If you are still figuring out who your real customers are and why they buy, a channel partner can actually slow that learning down. You need to be in the flow of conversation with the customer to discover whether three people want to buy the same thing from you so you can stop customizing.

The Story to Results Ratio: The Board Signal That Growth Has Stalled

Every early-stage company tells its investors stories about future success. That is natural and necessary. But at some point, the stories have to translate into results.

Michael described what he calls the "story to results ratio." When board meetings are filled with stories about meetings and conversations and interesting things learned, but never end with "and it resulted in them giving me money for my product," that ratio is off.

The red flag is not the stories themselves. It is how long they persist without results. A founder who has nothing to report but activity is not necessarily failing. But a founder who has nothing to report but activity for four consecutive board meetings, and is not naming that as a problem, is avoiding a hard truth.

Michael's observation is that very few founders will say "nothing happened, let's work on the problem." Most fill the space with stories because the alternative feels like admitting failure. But the real failure is not addressing why the pipeline is stuck. And the most common reason it is stuck is that the founder built for the champion and never mapped the full decision landscape.

The Founder's Scar: What Over-Committing Looks Like from Both Sides

When I asked Michael about his own founding experience at Omnisky, he told a story about office space. During the internet bubble, real estate in the Bay Area was at an extreme premium. Omnisky overcommitted a large portion of its capital to a lease because that was what landlords demanded. The commitment became a boat anchor that limited the company's ability to respond when conditions changed.

The modern equivalent, Michael said, is hiring too soon. Founders who raise money and immediately hire a sales team discover that those salespeople are not the founder. They do not innately know how to sell the value proposition. It takes months for them to become effective. And in the process, they discover every flaw in the product that the founder could easily sell around because the founder can sell the vision. The salespeople cannot.

The pattern is the same whether it is office space or headcount: over-committing resources before you know what works limits your ability to adapt when you discover you were wrong.

The Architect's Translation

What Michael described in this conversation is one of the most dangerous patterns in early-stage growth: mistaking validation for product-market fit.

The champion said yes. The pilot worked. The usage data looks great. Every signal says "we have traction." But none of that signal came from the people who actually approve the purchase. The founder over-indexed on the signal that felt good and ignored the signal that was missing.

The missing signal is silence. It is the procurement team that has not been engaged. It is the legal review that has not started. It is the operations leader who has not been consulted. Silence from those stakeholders is not neutral. It means they do not know you exist. When they discover you at the last minute, they react with suspicion, not enthusiasm.

This is why product-market fit is not discovered. It is decided. And you cannot decide it based on one buyer's enthusiasm. You decide it when you have mapped every person who can kill the deal and built your product, your pitch, and your sales process for all of them.

Growth did not stop because the product was wrong. It stopped because the founder heard yes from the person who couldn't actually buy and stopped asking who could.

Key Takeaways

1. A successful pilot tests whether your product works. It does not test whether the organization can buy it. Start socializing what happens after the pilot the day you enter it.

2. The person who loves your product is rarely the person who can purchase it. Map every stakeholder who has to say yes and build your pitch for each of them.

3. Your buyer is purchasing peace of mind, not features. If your pitch is about innovation and the buyer's priority is operational continuity, you are having the wrong conversation.

4. Channel partners open doors. They do not close deals. If you are still in customer discovery, being one step removed from the customer slows your learning.

5. The story to results ratio is the earliest board-level signal that growth is stalling. If your board meetings are stories without results for multiple quarters, name it as a problem.

6. The missing signal is silence. If procurement, legal, and operations have not engaged, that is not neutral. It means they do not know you exist.

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This article is based on Episode 2 of Why Growth Stops, a strategic briefing for founders and leadership teams at tech companies with real traction who can't figure out why growth isn't compounding. Watch the full episode on YouTube.

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Nico Fara is The PMF Architect and founder of Product Market Pro. She works with technically complex startups, AI infrastructure companies, and corporate spin-outs that have traction but can't figure out why growth isn't compounding. Her background spans deep tech engineering, building global tech companies, and go-to-market expertise.