At a Glance
- According to Secured Research’s 2025 equipment finance workplace survey, 62% of sales professionals can name a specific deal declined by credit that they believe would have performed—and 44% say that experience still influences how they position deals today.
- The stories sales teams tell about credit declines are rarely about the specific deal. They’re about trust, communication, and whether the organization rewards collaboration or self-protection.
- Credit teams carry their own version—the deals they approved under pressure that went sideways—and those stories drive conservative behavior that sales rarely sees.
- Companies that addressed the underlying structural issues behind these stories—not the stories themselves—saw measurable improvements in approval-to-funding conversion and cross-functional trust.
Every Firm Has One
Ask any equipment finance sales professional about the deal that got away, and the story comes immediately. It’s always detailed. The borrower’s profile, the equipment type, the deal size, the credit analyst who passed on it, and—most importantly—what happened afterward. The borrower got financing from a competitor, expanded their business, and is now a steady customer for someone else. The story is told at sales meetings, at industry events, in the hallway after pipeline reviews. It is, in organizational terms, a founding myth.
A VP of sales at a regional independent has been telling the same story for four years. A $2.8 million five-year FMV lease on a pair of CNC horizontal machining centers for a family-owned precision shop running aerospace subcontract work. Thirty years in business, backlog stretching into the following fiscal year, and a vendor relationship the RM had spent two years cultivating. The trailing twelve months showed debt service coverage at 1.1x—below the program threshold of 1.25x. Credit declined it on cash flow. “What the analyst missed was a $740,000 one-time charge buried in the prior year,” the VP recounted. “The borrower had settled a contract dispute with a former supplier and expensed the entire settlement in Q3. Strip that out and you’re looking at a 1.6x coverage ratio on normalized earnings with 90% investment-grade aerospace receivables and a 40-day cash conversion cycle. But the analyst was eight months in, spreading financials the way he’d been trained—he never picked up the phone to ask why operating expenses jumped 30% in a single quarter. He treated an anomaly like a trend line and killed a deal that any experienced underwriter would have restructured around.”
