No one needs to tell you that sales is a tough business: the rejection, the dead ends, the endless price quotes and proposals that often don’t lead to anything. You sometimes find yourself trying to sell a product or service to someone who...
- doesn’t know you and is not familiar with your company.
- is probably not interested (although they may act as if they are).
- doesn’t have the resources, nor the inclination to find them.
- can’t make a purchasing decision anyway!
Try as you might with personality, charm, data, million-dollar presentations, etc., the prospect - more often than not - doesn’t buy. Then, we tend to make excuses: the timing wasn’t right, it’s a bad economy, they already have another supplier, our price was too high, the customer lied, or any number of reasons. It’s never our fault; it was just a bad prospect!
The truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as a bad prospect. The individual or company you were trying to sell might be the perfect prospect for another supplier; they were just not a fit for your particular product or service. We think that our product or service is the perfect solution to whatever problem the prospect claims to be experiencing, but we may not have done an adequate job of qualifying – or disqualifying - the prospect. We continue the pursuit of the “opportunity,” and we then give up our product information – our intellectual property - with little or no hope of closing it! That’s called “Unpaid Consulting,” and that’s the definition of a bad salesperson.
Before you pour your time, effort, and resources into chasing potential dead-ends, take the time to qualify your prospects properly:
- Do they have a business problem you can potentially solve with your solution, and has the prospect admitted to having the problem?
- Are they committed to addressing the situation, or is it merely a minor annoyance they can live with?
- Are they willing to make the investment necessary – time, energy, resources - to fix the problem?
- Who are the stakeholders in the solution and how, and under what circumstances, will they decide to do business with you?
If you can’t check all of those boxes as you assess the potential opportunity, it’s your responsibility to pull the plug on that prospect and move on to the next. It’s not a bad prospect for someone; it’s just not a good prospect for you.
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Jim brings over 35 years of sales, management and marketing experience to the "training table." He has coached hundreds of business owners, sales executives, managers, and corporations to help them achieve greater levels of success and productivity. His areas of expertise range from sales and management training in the advertising and sports marketing fields to professional and business-to-business services, continuing education, new business development, staff hiring and assessments.
