Every sales team has been there. A big name hits your inbox, a request for proposal with potential zeros that make your CFO’s heart skip. You know it’s a long shot. You know they’re probably shopping the market or checking boxes for procurement. But the excitement wins, and you chase it anyway.
Then 100+ hours disappear, as well as thousands of dollars in the pursuit.
Not 100 imaginary hours, but 100 real hours of your best people’s time. Hours that could’ve gone into qualified prospects, client retention, or even rest.
At an engineering firm we recently worked with, that’s exactly what they calculated: up to 100 hours per proposal once marketing, operations, and technical experts got involved. They had a defined go/no-go process on paper. But saying no in reality? That’s where it fell apart.
Why Smart Teams Still Chase Bad Deals
It’s not stupidity. It’s emotion. Salespeople are optimists by nature. They want to win. And organizations unintentionally reward activity over progress. We praise motion. We celebrate effort. However, chasing unqualified opportunities creates a quiet tax that compounds quarter after quarter.
Here’s how it adds up...
1. Opportunity Cost: The Invisible Loss
Every RFP that doesn’t fit your ideal client profile steals time from those that do. When your proposal engineers are rewriting specs for a low-probability deal, your high-probability prospect isn’t being called, qualified, or nurtured. The pipeline appears full, but the close rate is dropping.
Sandler rule #4 applies here: “A decision not to prospect is a decision to fail.” If you’re stuck building proposals for the wrong clients, you’ve already chosen to fail the right ones.
2. The Internal Drain: Marketing and Technical Labor
In professional services and engineering, proposals aren’t one-person projects. You pull in marketing to polish, finance to quote, project managers to scope, and senior engineers to verify every detail. The people who drive delivery and innovation are pulled out of client work. They lose billable hours, context, and focus, all for a deal that may never close.
That cost doesn’t show up on a P&L. It shows up in burnout, missed deadlines, and the quiet resentment of technical experts who feel their time was wasted.
3. The Emotional Toll: Hope Fatigue
When a pursuit dies late, it doesn’t just drain time. It drains confidence. Teams that repeatedly lose on unqualified RFPs start to question their value. Managers push harder. Morale drops. Cynicism creeps in. The emotional residue of a bad pursuit makes it harder to bring your full energy to the next qualified one.
Sandler’s concept of Equal Business Stature matters here: you are not an unpaid consultant. You are a partner. That means walking away when the relationship is one-sided.
4. The Leadership Leak: Avoidance at the Top
Often, the real issue isn’t sales execution. It’s leadership avoidance. Saying “no-go” means owning the decision. It means admitting that not every logo is worth pursuing. Too often, firms delegate the emotional labor of disqualification to individual sellers rather than institutionalizing it as discipline.
A healthy go/no-go process is a leadership function, not a sales burden. It demands clear criteria, shared accountability, and permission to protect the team’s energy.
5. The Myth of the Near Miss
Many teams justify the chase with the “next time” narrative. “We came in second. Next time we’ll win.” But second place is still zero revenue, and the time you spent trying to impress that buyer is time wasted, used to train your competition. If the opportunity wasn’t real, than the effort was free consulting.
So What Should You Do Instead?
Define disqualification criteria as tightly as qualification criteria.
Track proposal hours just like revenue to make the hidden cost visible.
Hold a pre-bid “deal review” to ask: Is this in our strike zone?
Reward reps for no-go decisions that protect profitability.
Coach leaders to praise discernment as much as persistence.
Saying no faster isn’t negative. It’s strategic. It frees your best people to do their best work. It focuses your time on winnable business. And it fosters a culture of clarity rather than chaos. Every pursuit carries a cost. The only question is whether it earns a return.
If your team struggles to say no or keeps losing time to low-odds pursuits, it’s time to take a closer look at your qualification process.
At Next Level, we help sales organizations apply the discipline, mindset, and systems that protect time, focus, and profitability. Click here to take our sales leadership scorecard to see how you stack up against the best practices of high-performing organizations.
