The Ultimate Mid-Funnel Sales Plays: Top 5 Moves to Unstick Your Deals

We like to pretend our sales process is a straight, linear path: Stage 1 → Stage 2 → Stage 3. 

So if we check each box, revenue falls out the bottom. But anyone who has actually carried a bag knows that’s not how buying happens. 

A buying decision isn't one big "Yes" at the end of the quarter. It’s the product of dozens, maybe hundreds, of micro-decisions made along the way.

Should I take this meeting? Is this worth escalating to my boss? Do I have the energy to go fight for budget mid-year? Does this problem actually matter enough to risk my reputation on?

Which means your job is to engineer the right buying behaviors that lead to those small decisions. To help the prospect make progress through their own internal chaos.

This means the "standard process" breaks the moment a real human enters the equation.

Real selling is more “modular.” 

It’s about selecting the right set of plays that target exactly where the friction is—and then sequencing them to cut through it. Think of it like Lego blocks: 

You don't build the same castle every time. You look at the account, you look at the buying group, and you grab the specific components you need to build a path forward for them.

We’ve spent the last year studying the data inside Fluint. Looking into what Olli (the AI sales assistant by Fluint) has been doing with our highest-performing users. We wanted to know: 

Which specific moves were unsticking deals that, at first, looked dead in the water?

We found strong patterns. Certain "plays" (a way to combine messaging and deal strategy) showed up over and over again.

We’re opening up that playbook. 

Here are 5 of the most effective mid-funnel plays Olli’s been running, ready for you to deploy.

1. Building a Point of View & Account Plan

Why Deals Stall:

Most reps show up empty-handed. 

They treat the first few interactions like an interrogation, asking stuff like, “What keeps you up at night?" because they haven't done the work to figure it out themselves.

When you lead with questions instead of a point of view, you force the buyer to do the heavy lifting. You’re asking them to teach you about their business before you’ve proven you understand it. Which creates friction immediately. 

The buyer feels like they’re being pitched, not advised. They disengage because they don't see a peer—they see a vendor.

Why This Play

You have to “earn the right” to ask questions. You do that by leading with a Point of View (POV).

A POV isn't a pitch about your product features. It is a hypothesis about their business. It connects external shifts in the market to the internal pressure they are feeling right now. When you walk in and say, "I see X is changing, which typically means Y problem, for teams that have Z," then you aren't selling. You’re guiding.

This play works because it flips the dynamic. You’re guiding the conversation and generating interest by showing them a version of their reality they might have missed.

The Play

2. The Discovery Debrief

Why Deals Stall

Surface-level discovery kills more deals than pricing conversations or objections ever will.

Reps ask the standard list of questions. They get the standard, polite answers. Then they send a follow-up email that says, "Great chatting with you, here’s the deck we reviewed."

There’s no synthesis. No business case. So the buyer leaves the call with a vague sense of "that was nice," but zero urgency to change. The deal stalls because the rep never translated the conversation into a problem statement that hurts enough to fix.

Why This Play

Discovery isn’t over when Zoom closes. That’s when the real work begins.

The best reps synthesize immediately. They don't just transcribe notes; they hunt for gaps. They identify where they went shallow and need to go back. They sharpen a problem statement until it’s something the champion would be willing to put their name on internally.

This play forces rigor: 

It proves you understood the buyer better than they understand themselves. And a follow-up that articulates their problem more clearly than they did is the fastest way to build trust.

The Play

3. Group Demo Follow-Up

Why Deals Stall

You demo for 6 people. One is nodding, two are skeptical, and three are multitasking on mute.

After the call, most reps send one generic "Thank You" email to the entire group. "Thanks everyone for the time!"

Nobody responds. Why would they? That email wasn't for them. 

It was a broadcast. This approach ignores the reality of group buying: different stakeholders care about wildly different things. The CFO doesn't care about the user interface, and the end-user doesn't care about the contract terms. 

Treating them as a monolith ensures you lose the nuance required to drive consensus.

Why This Play

The rep who wins follows up like they were actually paying attention.

They send personalized messages to individuals, referencing specific questions asked or reactions observed. "Susan, I saw you perk up when we mentioned the API integration—here is the documentation on that." "Mark, you asked about security compliance—here is our SOC 2 report."

This play turns a demo into momentum by treating the buying committee as a collection of individuals. It proves you were listening, and it gives each person the specific ammunition they need to advocate for you in the meetings that happen when you aren't in the room.

The Play

4. Targeting the Skeptic

Why Deals Stall

There’s always someone who isn't bought in.

Maybe it’s IT worrying about implementation tickets and their backlog. Maybe it’s a manager who vouched for the legacy system. Most reps try to ignore this person, hoping the Champion can steamroll them. Or worse, they try to "handle" the skeptic with canned objection responses that sound defensive.

Ignoring the skeptic doesn't make them go away. It just ensures they’ll kill your deal in a private email thread you’ll never see.

Why This Play

Skeptics aren't enemies. They are usually the most honest people in the deal.

They are protecting something—budget, time, security, or internal capital. If they’re pushing back, it’s because they see a risk your Champion is ignoring or downlplaying. The move isn't to overcome them; it's to validate them.

You need to understand what they are protecting and reframe your solution so it serves that interest rather than threatening it. When you turn a skeptic into a neutral party (or even an ally), the deal gets unblocked. 

This play uses Olli to profile that hesitation and draft a strategy to address it head-on.

The Play

5. Stuck Deal Diagnosis

Why Deals Stall

You had momentum. Now you have silence.

Emails go unanswered. Meetings get bumped. The Champion says they are "still interested," but nothing moves.

The instinct for 90% of reps is to push harder. “Just bubbling this up!” “Checking in!” More emails. More pressure.

It doesn't work. Deals don't stall because buyers forgot. They stall because something changed internally. Priorities shifted. A stakeholder pushed back. The business case didn't land. Pestering them doesn't fix the blocker; it just makes you annoying.

Why This Play

You have to stop selling and start diagnosing.

The play here is to run a "deal pre-mortem" before it dies. You need to hypothesize the real blocker—is it politics? Budget? A missing stakeholder?

Once you have a hypothesis, you can test it. You send a message that addresses the elephant in the room. You give them an out. You change the angle. This play stops the mindless follow-up cycle and forces a decision: either we re-engage on new terms, or we part ways. Both are better than limbo.

The Play

Build Your Own Process

These are just 5 of the plays. The full library contains 12+ modules covering the entire buying journey, from that first cold outreach to the final procurement negotiation.

You don't need to use all of them on every deal. That’s the point. You grab the block you need, when you need it.

You can download Olli’s full Playlist below.

[Download the Mid-Funnel Plays Library]

Or, better yet: let him run them for you.

[Try Olli for Free]

Sales Teams: Hire Olli

I’m the AI sales assistant built to handle the heavy lifting reps usually avoid: I don’t just summarize notes; I select and execute the right play — building the business cases, executive briefs, multithreading outreach — that actually moves each deal forward.

I dig into the data, identify what’s missing, and draft the high-stakes communications needed to reclaim momentum (all at 10% of the cost of a traditional hire). 

Stop hoping your reps will find the time to do this deep work. I'll do it with and for them.

Chat with my team of humans and see how I can help →

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