Capstone Sales Development Blog

Posted by Charles Ingram on Mon., June 22, 2009 @ 02:35 PM

Ever dealt with a prospect who, you discover, doesn’t make the final decision? If you manage sales people, this is likely something that fries your bacon on a regular basis. Part of what makes this difficult for a sales manager is that it is easy to answer a salesperson who finds himself in this situation glibly and say, “You should stop the sales call until the higher authority is available.”

That is optimum and salespeople should be careful not to artificially empower the contact who can only say no (not yes). With that said, successful sales are often about finding the best business case among several less than optimum choices.

If your contact is standing between you and the higher authority you have five options:

1. Politely withdraw

“Please don’t take this the wrong way. But nine out of ten times when I am not the one making the presentation, I don’t make the sale. I’m sure it’s my fault, but I don’t want to waste your time or mine. So it sounds as though it’s over…”

2. Artificial Decision Making

Treat your contact as if he is the decision maker and proceed. The goal is to get him to drink your Kool-Aid and become your inside sales person.

3. Technical Consultant

Ask permission to be available to your contact as a technical consultant. You promise not to go into sell mode, but you are available when the money person asks questions he can’t answer.

4. Rehearsal

Brief your contact on presenting your product/service. Have him feed back to you how he is going to answer a variety of questions. Hopefully he will realize it’s better to bring you. If not, then at least he is prepared.

5. Put it in his world

This is “salesperson empathy.” If he were in your shoes, how would he handle this? Keep it business, not personal.

As a manager you now have a teachable moment to explore which option(s) might be available to your salesperson and a cost-benefit analysis for any option which might apply.

As with nearly everything in sales, staying away from the highest swings of the pendulum—in this case, chasing business no matter the tenuous connection to the real authority, or walking away from anything which requires even the slightest outside-the-box thinking—is the advisable strategy.

Posted by Jim Lee 6/9/09 at 9:45 a.m.

-Did you know…

…the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004 (we are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that don’t yet exist to solve problems we don’t yet know are problems)

…today’s student will have 10-14 jobs by age 38, 25% of workers have been in their current jobs one year or less, 50% less than five years

…1 in 8 couples who married the past 12 months met online

…there are 200 million users registered for MySpace, which would rank it the fifth largest country in the world (between Indonesia and Brazil)

…the number-one ranked country in broadband penetration is Bermuda (the US is 19, Japan is 22)

…there are 31 billion searches on Google every month (this number was 2.7 billion in 2006)

…the first commercial text message was sent in December 1992, today the number sent

exceeds the population of the planet every day

…years it took to reach market audience of 50 million: radio – 38 years, TV – 13 years,

internet – 4 years, ipod – 3 years, Facebook – 2 years

…the number of internet devices in 1992 was 1,000,000; in 2008 it was 1,000,000,000

…there are about 540,000 words in the English language, 5 times more than in Shakespeare’s time

…it is estimated that the amount of information in the New York Times in one week exceeds what the average person would be exposed to in a lifetime in the 18^th century

…it is estimated that 4 exebytes (a lot) of unique information will be generated this year, this is more than the previous 5,000 years

…the amount of technical information is doubling every two years, so for technical students beginning a four-year degree this year, half of what they learn will be outdated by their third year of study

…NTT Japan has successfully tested a fiber optic cable that pushes 14 trillion bits per second down a single strand of fiber – this is 2660 CDs or 210 million phone calls every second; it is currently tripling every six months and is expected to do so for the next 20 years

…it is estimated that by 2013, a super computer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain, and predictions are that by 2049 a $1000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human species

…during the past five minutes, 694,000 songs were downloaded illegally

We can’t control the pace of change, but we can control how we deal with change. Sales managers should ask their teams to create one list of things they CAN control and another list of things they CAN’T control. Mangers should then encourage their sales people to focus 100% of their time and energy on the things they CAN control. Nothing blows away the sense of helplessness like having an action plan and taking daily action against that plan.