#9 - Why most B2B onchain finance deals stall before the proposal

Most B2B onchain finance deals stall before the proposal because they were never qualified. The pipeline fills with accounts that look right on paper, with funding, a large treasury or a known brand, but have no allocated budget, no one with authority to buy, no urgent problem or no buying window. A proposal cannot close any of those gaps, so qualification has to happen before the account executive’s first call.

An ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the type of company most likely to buy and succeed with your product. BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) is a qualification checklist: IBM’s own partner qualification form treats an opportunity as validated only when the seller knows the customer’s budget, authority, need and timeframe (source).

If you sell onchain finance infrastructure, from treasury management and stablecoin payments to yield, vesting, custody, tokenization, or other financial infrastructure, you may recognize this pattern: the pipeline looks healthy, meetings are happening, opportunities are being created, but the conversion rate remains low. Deals seem to move forward, prospects ask for proposals, and then everything goes quiet.

The instinct is often to look at the proposal, pricing, sales messaging, or closing process. But in many B2B onchain finance deals, the problem starts much earlier: the opportunity was never properly qualified in the first place.

The issue is often a combination of the wrong ICP and weak qualification. When superficial signals are treated as buying signals, the pipeline becomes filled with companies that look promising on paper but have no real budget, no clear decision-maker, no urgent need, or no defined buying window. The result is a pipeline that looks bigger while becoming less connected to actual revenue.

This is particularly relevant in onchain finance, where buying decisions can involve founders, engineering, finance, operations, compliance, procurement, investors, and sometimes governance. Gartner’s 2025 survey of 632 B2B buyers found buying groups ranging from five to 16 people across as many as four functions (source). A company can have significant treasury, recent funding, a technically sophisticated team, and an obvious interest in a category without being ready to buy a solution.

The practical consequence is simple: by the time a prospect asks for a proposal, the deal should already be heavily qualified. If the fundamental criteria around Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing are still unclear at that point, the proposal is unlikely to solve the problem.

Why deals stall before the proposal

The first problem is the wrong ICP, a company can appear to have a strong fit based on funding, company size, treasury, category, or market visibility and still not be the type of customer that actually buys the solution. These signals provide context, but they do not prove commercial fit. A recently funded company may have capital but no budget allocated to the category. A company with a large treasury may have significant assets but no operational resources available for external vendors, a recognizable brand may have market relevance without having a current need.

The second problem is the absence of real budget, financial capacity and purchasing capacity are not the same thing. A company can have raised millions or manage a significant treasury while having no budget available for a specific vendor or initiative. In onchain finance, understanding where the money sits, who controls it, how it is allocated, and what the procurement process looks like is part of qualification, treasury is not operational budget.

The third problem is authority, interest from the wrong person does not move a deal forward. A Head of BD, community lead, or other visible stakeholder may introduce a solution without having the authority to approve it. The actual decision can sit with a founder, CFO, CTO, Head of Engineering, Head of Operations, or a group of stakeholders across functions. Procurement often sits in that group too: in its 2026 research on how companies buy, Forrester found procurement professionals are decision-makers in 53% of purchases (source). A qualified opportunity needs a visible path from the initial contact to the people who can approve the purchase, without that path, interest remains interest.

The fourth problem is the absence of an urgent need, a prospect can think a solution is interesting without having a sufficiently important problem to solve now. “Interesting” does not necessarily mean buying intent. Real need is specific, costly, and connected to a business consequence. Strong signals can include a problem the company is already discussing publicly, a governance proposal around the category, technical content revealing a priority, or hiring patterns that indicate an existing bottleneck, the key distinction is whether the problem exists independently of the vendor.

The fifth problem is the lack of an internal champion, even when there is budget and a legitimate need, deals can stall if nobody inside the organization owns the purchase strongly enough to move it forward. B2B buying decisions often involve Finance, Compliance, Procurement, Engineering, Product, and leadership. Each stakeholder can introduce a different objection or requirement, and Gartner found that 74% of B2B buyer teams show unhealthy conflict during the decision (source). Without someone internally defending the business case and coordinating the process, the opportunity can lose momentum before the proposal is ever seriously evaluated.

The sixth problem is the absence of a real buying window, a company can have the right profile, sufficient resources, a legitimate problem, and decision-makers involved, yet still not be ready to buy. The LinkedIn B2B Institute, working with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, estimates that 95% of potential B2B buyers are not ready to buy today (source). Onchain finance deals are often connected to specific business events: a token generation event (TGE), mainnet launch, regulatory deadline, funding milestone, product launch, budget cycle, or another operational trigger. Without a concrete event creating urgency, the opportunity may remain relevant but not actionable, a response is not timing, a defined buying window is.

The seventh problem is a weak business case: a strong motivation to justify a B2B purchase. The solution needs to connect to something the organization can defend internally: lower costs, greater operational efficiency, reduced risk, access to new markets, faster execution, additional revenue, or another measurable business outcome. When the value remains abstract, the proposal becomes much harder to prioritize against everything else competing for the company’s resources.

This is why asking for a proposal should not automatically be interpreted as progress. By that point, the opportunity should already have a clear business case, decision structure, internal owner, and buying window. Otherwise, the proposal simply becomes another document sitting in someone’s inbox.

Wrong ICP creates an inflated pipeline

One of the most expensive mistakes in B2B onchain finance sales is confusing superficial signals with qualification.

A company that raised $20 million 60 days ago may appear to have budget, but the raise does not tell you who controls the money, how it is allocated, or whether your category is a priority. A founder replying “interesting” may appear to have expressed interest, but it can simply be a polite response from a busy executive. A company with an $80 million treasury may look financially capable, but treasury is not the same thing as operational budget.

When these signals are treated as qualification, the sales development representative (SDR) fills the calendar of the account executive (AE) with meetings that were never likely to become opportunities. The AE then spends an hour in discovery only to discover that there is no budget, no authority, no actual problem, or no buying timeline. That time is scarce: Salesforce’s State of Sales 2026 found the average seller spends 40% of their time selling (source). The most expensive minute in a sales organization is not necessarily the minute an SDR spends prospecting, it is the AE’s time spent in a call with a lead that should never have reached the AE.

BANT as a qualification framework for onchain finance

This is where BANT becomes useful: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing are not new concepts, but they provide a simple structure for separating real opportunities from pipeline noise.

Dimension	What to confirm	A signal that is not enough
Budget	Operational resources available for the purchase, who controls them, the procurement workflow	A recent funding round or a large treasury
Authority	The decision-maker, the champion, the economic buyer and the path between them	Interest from a Head of BD or a community lead
Need	A specific, costly problem with a business consequence	A reply saying “interesting”
Timing	A launch, TGE, regulatory deadline or budget cycle that opens a buying window	A response to outreach

Budget establishes whether there are actual resources available for the purchase and how those resources can be accessed. Authority identifies the decision structure and the people who can approve the purchase. Need establishes whether there is a specific problem with a meaningful business consequence. Timing determines whether there is a real reason to buy within a defined window.

The framework is useful because it prevents the team from treating one strong signal as sufficient qualification. A recent funding round does not compensate for the absence of need. A strong need does not compensate for the absence of authority. A decision-maker does not compensate for the absence of timing. A deal needs enough evidence across all four dimensions to justify moving forward.

How to redefine your ICP

If the pipeline is inflated and conversion is low, the ICP should be one of the first things to investigate, so start with the last 10 closed-won deals. Document the type of company, treasury or recent raise, champion persona, timing event, and specific problem the product solved. Patterns should emerge, you may discover that most successful deals came from a specific category, at a particular stage of maturity, with a specific buyer involved, sufficient operational resources, and a recognizable event creating urgency.

Then analyze the last 10 early-stage losses, look for recurring characteristics across company type, size, stage, budget, authority, need, and timing. If the same characteristics repeatedly appear in early losses, you have identified your anti-ICP. Those accounts should be actively excluded from the pipeline rather than continuously recycled.

The next step is to define the ICP across the four BANT dimensions. For example, a vesting solution might target companies that raised at least $10 million in the previous 12 months, maintain sufficient stablecoin or fiat resources, have a founder, CTO, or Head of Engineering as the decision-maker or clear champion, are actively defining their vesting or airdrop infrastructure, and have a TGE planned within the next three to six months. This creates a much more useful definition of ICP than company size, funding, industry, or treasury alone.

MOIC Digital works this way in its own pre-sales operations. For Hypernative, an onchain security company expanding into Latin America, the work began with ICP analysis and account research that mapped 570 companies and 1,380 decision-makers before outreach. In 12 weeks, the program booked 52 meetings, 40 of them qualified, and generated $600K in pipeline (see the case).

Measure qualification, not just activity

Once the ICP is defined, the sales organization needs to change what it measures.

Instead of focusing only on outreach volume, track the percentage of outreach going to ICP accounts, the percentage of responses coming from ICP accounts, and the percentage of AE calls that become real opportunities. Disqualification should be treated as a positive outcome when it happens early. A business development representative (BDR) who identifies that a prospect is not qualified before the AE spends time on the account is protecting sales capacity.

Three metrics are particularly useful: pre-AE disqualification rate, post-AE disqualification rate, and AE conversion rate.

Pre-AE disqualification	Post-AE disqualification	What it means
Low	High	The BDR passes too many unqualified leads, and the AE does the qualification work
High	Low	The BDR filters effectively
High	High	The ICP itself may be wrong, and the team could be prospecting the wrong type of company

Shared criteria matter as much as the metrics. Gartner asked over 200 sales leaders about alignment, and 62% reported that marketing and sales use different definitions of a qualified lead (source). Keeping one definition across marketing, sales and customer success is the job of revenue operations (how RevOps works in onchain finance).

The goal is not to maximize the number of opportunities entering the CRM. It is to increase the percentage of pipeline connected to real buying potential. Generic SaaS benchmarks can also be misleading when the deal structure, buying process, and sales cycle are fundamentally different.

A cleaner pipeline creates better revenue visibility

Before an AE call, the BDR should have a clear view of four dimensions. Budget means understanding whether the prospect has operational resources available, who controls them, and what the procurement workflow looks like.

Authority means identifying the decision-maker, the champion, the economic buyer, and the path between them. Need means identifying the specific problem, the current workaround, and the concrete business consequence of leaving it unresolved.

Timing means identifying the launch, regulatory deadline, funding milestone, budget cycle, product milestone, or other event that creates a genuine buying window. If any of these dimensions remains unclear, the lead needs more research or nurture. It does not necessarily need an AE call.

A cleaner pipeline is not necessarily a smaller pipeline, but a pipeline where the opportunities have a stronger connection to an actual buying process. For B2B onchain finance companies, that distinction matters. Revenue comes from identifying companies with the right problem, resources, decision process, and reason to buy now.

From pipeline volume to revenue potential

A stronger pipeline depends on a clear understanding of where the commercial opportunity lies, which accounts have real potential, and what drives buying decisions in the market.

That is where market intelligence and commercial strategy come together.

At MOIC, we help B2B onchain finance companies turn market intelligence into commercial advantage. We combine data, market understanding, positioning, and growth strategy to sharpen the ICP, identify high-potential opportunities, and create stronger conditions for qualified demand, through our Sales & Pipeline and Intelligence & Revenue services.

The goal is to connect market opportunity, commercial positioning, qualified demand, and revenue through a more informed growth strategy. If your pipeline is growing but deals are moving slowly, another campaign may not solve the underlying challenge, a clearer understanding of where the opportunity lies, which accounts matter, and how the market is evolving can create a stronger path to revenue.

FAQ

What is BANT in B2B sales?

BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need and Timing. It is a checklist for deciding whether an account is a real opportunity, and a deal needs evidence on all four before it moves to a proposal.

Why do prospects go quiet after asking for a proposal?

Usually because the deal was never qualified. If the budget, the decision-maker, the problem or the buying window was still unclear, the proposal has nothing to move it forward.

How do you redefine an ICP for an onchain finance company?

Study the last 10 closed-won deals and the last 10 early-stage losses. The wins show the company type, resources, buyer and timing event that lead to a purchase, and the losses show which accounts to exclude.

Which metrics show whether qualification is working?

Track the pre-AE disqualification rate, the post-AE disqualification rate and the AE conversion rate. A high disqualification rate after the AE call means the AE is doing the qualification work.