Don’t Give Up!

March 18, 2009 by gviggiano

You have a solid sales process that used to produce lots of money per sales rep, but now is producing next to nothing. What went wrong?
The answer is that the clients started answering your questions with vague answers.  When the person asked for clarification, the client would stall the sales rep with things like we have a few things to check, budget, time lines, etc. The truth: they just were too scared to be honest with us!
Salespeople are numb to the fact that people are not buying.  When you make your follow up calls, they tell you that it’s tied up in budget…but to check back again.  So you wait to follow up, with answers to their questions, but you get stalled again. It’s not until you dig further that you are made aware of the true problem: they aren’t buying and have no idea when that will change.  So as any good salesperson, you dive into your list and start the process again. But the changes are apparent at all companies…there just not telling you!

So we present our sales leaders with some difficult choices. What do we do? Do we just give up? Offer them free terms?

You just need to ask tougher questions. Instead of asking questions about budget, ask questions about their intent to buy. Do you intend to buy this? What will cause this situation to change? Why are they looking to make a change? Where else are they looking? If they have to decide today, will we win or lose? Why? Is anything going on in the company that we need to know about? If you get the answers to these questions, at least you’ll know the status of the deals and now your pipeline becomes real.

Just try it today and let me know if it works.

→ 4 CommentsCategories: Executive Selling, Major Account Selling, Questioning Skills, Sales Skills, Sales Stories, Tactical Selling Skills

4 Comments so far ↓

  • Laszlo // Apr 13, 2009 at 11:42 pm

    Thanks Gordon,
    We’ll try this and report back to ya.

  • Ed Carroll // Apr 14, 2009 at 12:42 am

    Gordon, I like this, it’s another version of “going for no”. But you don’t tell us what to do when everyone says “no”. For me the answer is in the question, “what can I do to change the answer to yes.”

  • Gordon Viggiano // Apr 14, 2009 at 6:21 pm

    Ed,
    “No” is another response that you will get…and you are right. Ask a question that pushes them to think, rather then accept no! The point is don’t take a “NO”; use it as a start for probing!

  • Gordon Viggiano // Apr 14, 2009 at 6:24 pm

    Laszlo,

    Good luck!

    Gordon

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