So why does the devil you know still win 86% of the time?

Somewhere in your company, a team is running a process everyone agrees is broken. A spreadsheet with three people’s names still in the macros. A tool nobody likes, but everybody has learned to work around. Ask why it has not been replaced. The honest answer is rarely “we have not found anything better.” It is closer to: the devil you know.

That phrase earns its keep. Behavioral economists have a less colorful name for it: loss aversion. The idea is the same. A known cost, even a painful one, feels safer than an unknown benefit. The broken spreadsheet has a shape you understand. The new tool is still a guess, no matter how good the demo looked.

This shows up in the data at a scale most vendors underestimate. Roughly 86% of B2B purchases stall before anyone makes a decision, according to research by Gartner and Corporate Visions. Not lost to a competitor. Not rejected outright. Stalled, which is the quieter and more common way the devil you know wins.

Part of the reason is structural. The average B2B buying group now runs to 22 stakeholders, thirteen inside the company and nine outside it, per Forrester’s research on business buying. Every one of those people has their own version of the devil they know. A deal with six or more stakeholders stalls at roughly twice the rate of one with three or fewer, according to Corporate Visions. Getting everyone to agree that the new thing is worth the risk is a harder problem than getting any one of them to agree individually.

Pricing changes make this worse, not better. This is where many vendors misread the room. The instinct is to treat resistance to a new pricing model as an education problem. The assumption is that a clear enough explanation makes the friction disappear. But the friction is not really about understanding the model. It is about what happens if the model costs more than expected after the switch, once going back is no longer an option.

That fear is earned. In the last twelve months, 78% of IT leaders were hit with unexpected AI or consumption-based charges, according to Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Pricing Trends Report. Sixty-one percent of them cut planned projects specifically because of price increases tied to that kind of shift. Once a buyer has been burned by an unpredictable bill, every future pricing conversation gets read through that memory. That includes vendors who had nothing to do with the first one.

The market’s own response to this is telling. Pure usage-based pricing, the model many vendors assumed customers would eventually prefer, has not become the default. What has won instead is a hybrid: a committed floor, with usage on top of it. It gives finance a predictable number they can still put in a budget line. Buyers were never against paying for what they use. They were against not knowing, in advance, what they would owe.

There is also a newer fear pulling in the opposite direction. Speed is now treated as the only differentiator that matters. The assumption spreading through boardrooms is blunt: adopt an agentic way of working, or disappear. That fear is not entirely wrong. It is aimed at the wrong target. Gartner expects more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027. Most fail because the agent was asked to replace judgment instead of speeding it up. McKinsey found nearly nine in ten companies already use AI somewhere in the business. Only 6 percent can point to AI actually moving their profit. Adoption alone was never the differentiator. Knowing which decision the AI is supposed to speed up, with a person still making the call, is.

None of this means the devil you know actually deserves to win. The broken spreadsheet is still broken. The tool everyone has learned to work around still costs real time every week that nobody bothers to add up. It is easier to tolerate a familiar cost than to quantify it. Status quo bias is not a sign of good judgment. It is what good judgment looks like when it has no way to price the alternative.

The vendors who get past it are rarely the ones with the most urgent pitch. They are the ones who make the unknown legible. What changes. What does not? What it costs on day one, and what it could cost on the worst day. All of it stated plainly enough that a buyer does not have to take it on faith. Urgency asks someone to jump. Legibility lets them see where they will land.

Legibility is not just a nicer story to tell. A mutual action plan, a shared, written timeline of what happens next and when, is one concrete version of it. Deals with one close at 2.1 times the rate of deals without one, per Gong’s analysis of 500,000-plus B2B sales calls. The plan does not remove the risk of the unknown. It puts a name and a date on it, which is most of what a buyer actually needs.

The devil you know wins only when nobody bothers to show the buyer what waits on the other side.