Parked, Not Lost: How to Sell to Buyers Frozen by Tariff Whiplash

February 20: the Supreme Court rules that IEEPA doesn't give the president authority to impose tariffs.

Same day: the White House reimposes them under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a statute with a 150-day limit.

May: the Court of International Trade rules against the Section 122 tariff too. An appeal follows.

July 24: Section 122 expires, and new Section 301 tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on roughly 60 economies take effect at 12:01 a.m.

That's three legal bases for the same policy in about five months. If you sell anything to a company that imports, manufactures, or ships goods across a border, you've watched that calendar play out in your pipeline, usually as a champion saying some version of "we love it, we just can't commit right now."

For Sales Leaders, RevOps Teams, and B2B Executives selling into manufacturing, distribution, retail, and any buyer with a supply chain: most of the deals you lost this year to "timing" weren't lost. They were parked. And the way most revenue teams handle a parked deal quietly turns it into a lost one.

The number that should change how you code your pipeline

KPMG has been surveying 300 U.S. C-suite leaders at $1B+ companies about tariffs since May 2025. The wave fielded in February and March 2026 found that 68% of organizations had delayed or postponed investments, most commonly by up to 12 months.

Here's the part sales teams skip past. In the same research, KPMG notes that outright cancellations remain limited. Leaders aren't killing projects. They're pushing them out, and when they do spend, they're "favoring smaller, more flexible investments while reassessing risk and return thresholds."

Read that as a seller and it's a very different message from "the market is dead." Your buyers still have the problem. They still want to fix it. What they don't have is confidence that the ground under the business case will be in the same place next quarter.

Half of those leaders told KPMG they have low confidence in executing their investment plans. That's the real objection sitting behind "not right now," and it isn't about your product.

Why the usual playbook makes it worse

Watch what happens to a tariff-frozen deal inside a typical CRM.

The rep pushes the close date. Then pushes it again. By the third slip, the manager asks for it to be closed out because it's polluting the forecast, so it lands in closed-lost with a reason code like "timing" or "no budget." Nobody owns it after that. Six months later the buyer's plan unfreezes, they run a fresh evaluation, and your competitor gets the first call because they happened to be in the inbox that week.

That's two failures stacked on top of each other.

The first is a forecast failure. A deal that's slipped three times is dragging your coverage ratio up and your accuracy down, and win rates across B2B were already ugly. Ebsta and Pavilion's 2025 GTM benchmarks put the average B2B win rate around 19%, down from about 29% the year before, with 78% of sellers missing quota. Parked deals left in active stages make those numbers look better on Monday and worse at quarter end.

The second is a memory failure. Once it's in closed-lost, the deal has no owner, no trigger, and no next step. You did all the hard work of getting a buying group to agree they have a problem, and then you threw away the asset.

The fix isn't to try harder to close. Pressuring a CFO who just watched three tariff regimes in five months is how you turn a "later" into a "never."

Treat "parked" as its own stage

The single most useful change is structural, and it takes an afternoon in your CRM.

Create a status that isn't open pipeline and isn't closed-lost. Call it Parked or Deferred: external trigger. A deal only earns it if three things are written down:

1. The trigger. What specific event would unfreeze this? "Economy improves" doesn't count. "Their Q4 landed-cost review," "the Section 301 exemption list is finalized," or "the new plant in Ohio passes its go/no-go" all count.
2. A review date. Tied to the trigger when the trigger has a date, and never more than 90 days out when it doesn't.
3. A named owner. Usually the original AE. Sometimes a nurture or partner team if the AE has moved on.

Pull these deals out of the weighted forecast entirely and report them as a separate number. Your board will like it more than you'd expect. "We have $4M in parked pipeline with named triggers" is a far more honest sentence than a coverage ratio padded with deals everyone privately knows are frozen.

Ask the question that finds the trigger

Most reps never learn the trigger because they never ask for it. They hear "we're pausing" and go straight to "totally understand, I'll check back next quarter."

Try this instead: "If you imagine this project restarting, what's the thing that happened right before it did?"

It's a gentler version of "what would have to be true," and it gets surprisingly specific answers. A VP of operations might tell you the landed-cost model has to be rerun once the new duty rates settle. A CFO might say nothing moves until they know whether a refund on the IEEPA duties they already paid is coming. A plant manager might say the capex committee meets in January and nothing gets reconsidered before then.

Every one of those is a date or an event you can watch. Put it in the record.

It's also worth asking a second question, because not every "tariffs" answer is real: "If tariffs weren't a factor at all, would we be signing this month?" If the honest answer is no, tariffs were a polite exit, and you've got a different problem (usually value, sometimes a competitor). Better to learn that now than to nurture a deal that was never coming back.

Shrink the first decision

KPMG's finding that leaders prefer "smaller, more flexible investments" is the most practical sentence in the whole report for a seller. It tells you what shape of deal is still getting approved.

A buyer who can't sign a three-year, company-wide rollout can often sign something much narrower. Some patterns that tend to fit a frozen budget:

• A single site, line, or business unit first, with the expansion price written into the original order form so the second decision is an easy one.
• Shorter initial terms with a pre-agreed renewal path, instead of a steep discount for a long commitment the buyer can't defend right now.
• Scope that pays for itself inside the uncertainty window. If the buyer's horizon is 12 months, a business case that breaks even in month 18 won't clear the CFO, however good it looks on a slide.

This isn't the same as giving away a free pilot. The goal is a real, paid, reversible first step. Reversibility is what the buyer is really shopping for in 2026, and a smaller commitment with a clear exit is often easier to approve than a bigger one at a better price.

Point the business case at what keeps the CFO up at night

The same KPMG survey is effectively a list of what's on your buyer's finance team's desk:

• 78% of organizations reported higher cost of goods sold in their most recent quarter.
• 51% reported current margin declines, most commonly in the 1% to 20% range.
• 55% plan further price increases of up to 15% within six months, and the share passing through more than half of tariff costs to their own customers rose from 13% in May 2025 to 34% in February 2026.
• 31% hired specialized roles to handle tariff, trade, and compliance complexity, up from 22% the previous September. 44% invested in automation that produced little or no net job growth.
• 26% are now in formal planning or active execution of reshoring, up from 10% six months earlier, and 60% say fully reshoring would take one to three years.

If your pitch deck still leads with "growth" and "productivity," it's talking past all of that. The budgets that are still moving are the ones attached to margin protection, cost visibility, compliance workload, and supply chain resilience.

So rewrite the business case in those terms. If your software cuts manual work, frame it against the tariff-specialist headcount the buyer just had to add. If it improves pricing or quoting, frame it against the price increases they're about to push through and the margin they're trying to hold. If it touches operations, connect it to the reshoring program that just moved from a slide into a budget line.

Same product. Different reason to buy now, and a reason the CFO already believes.

Keep parked deals warm with substance

"Just checking in" is the worst possible message to send a parked buyer. It reminds them of a decision they couldn't make and gives them nothing in return.

The better move is to become the vendor who sends useful information about the thing that froze the deal in the first place. When the Section 122 clock was running, it had a public end date. When the Section 301 tariffs landed, the exemptions (raw materials, products unavailable domestically, articles already under Section 232 tariffs, and a few others) mattered enormously to some buyers and not at all to others.

A short note that says "here's what the July 24 change means for companies that look like yours" earns you a reply. A note that says "any update on timing?" earns you silence.

You don't need to be a trade lawyer to do this. You need one person on the team (product marketing, a solutions consultant, or a curious RevOps analyst) who tracks the policy calendar, and a habit of turning each change into a two-paragraph note your AEs can forward. Keep it factual, and point people to their own counsel for anything that sounds like advice.

Build a trigger calendar

Once parked deals have named triggers, patterns show up fast. Six deals might be waiting on the same exemption ruling. Ten might be waiting on year-end capex committees. A handful might hinge on whether a court appeal goes one way or the other.

Put those on one calendar that sales, marketing, and customer success can all see. When a trigger fires, the owner gets a task that day, not a quarterly reminder.

This is where parked pipeline stops being a graveyard and starts acting like a warm list. The buyer already knows you. The buying group already agreed on the problem. You just have to be first through the door when the door opens, and the calendar tells you roughly when that'll be.

The honest limits

A few cautions, because none of this is a guarantee.

KPMG surveyed large companies about capital investment, not software purchases. Their 68% figure is about postponed investment broadly. It's a strong signal about how your enterprise buyers are behaving, but it isn't a measure of your pipeline, and cancellations being "limited" for their capital projects doesn't promise your deal comes back.

Some parked deals will die anyway. Leaders change, priorities shift, a competitor gets in during the freeze. A parked stage makes the losses visible. It doesn't prevent them.

Uncertainty isn't going to be a phase you wait out. The share of executives expecting margin improvement jumped from 7% to 44% right after the February ruling, and the policy kept moving for months afterward. Plan for a buyer environment where the rules change a few times a year, not one where they settle down.

Don't make tariffs an excuse for your own forecast. If your team starts coding every stalled deal as "tariff timing," you've built a new place for bad pipeline to hide. The trigger requirement exists to stop exactly that.

What to do this week

You can start on most of this before Friday:

1. Pull every deal that's slipped its close date two or more times since February.
2. For each one, get the AE to answer two questions: what's the trigger, and would they sign today if tariffs weren't a factor?
3. Move the ones with a real trigger into a Parked status, out of the weighted forecast, with a review date and an owner.
4. Close out the ones where tariffs were a cover story, and write down the real reason.
5. Pick your three biggest parked deals and draft a smaller, reversible first step for each.
6. Name one person to own the policy calendar and ship the first two-paragraph update to parked buyers.

Your buyers didn't say no this year. Most of them said "not yet, and I don't know when." The teams that treat that answer as information, and build a system around it, will be the ones on the first call when the budgets thaw.