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06.29.06
Sales Recovery: How To Manage A Sale Going Wrong
 By
Sharon Drew Morgen
Do you know the difference between which prospect you'll close and which one you'll lose?
How can you tell, midway through a sale, whether you're on track for success or you've lost the deal?
How can you tell, in advance, that the sale won't close... ever?
All prospect situations seem to be going along successfully until they aren't. You work hard to find the prospect who has appropriate need and interest. You do your front end due diligence. You promote and pitch the product professionally. You follow the process of objections, time delays, surprises. You even project a time when the sale will close - much to your manager's dismay. And you hope, hope, that this time all of your hard work will pay off. But it's a guess.
There seems to be no way of knowing which prospect will actually close, and which one will disappear forever into choices you have no control over.
OUT OF THE LOOP
How do you end up being wrong so often? Most calculations state that from first prospecting call to close, only approximately 7% of your prospects will make a purchase. If that's true - or anything close to that number is true - you're wasting, say, 90% of your time. What's even worse, you believe that you're going to be successful until far into your time wastage.
I know I personally sometimes either deny signs that a sale might be going south, or arrogantly believe I can save the day somehow.
But the reality is, as outsiders, the only data you have is either data your prospect has chosen to share, or from your own best guess based on similar situations.
One of the problems is that you're basing your hopes and guesswork on historic patterns - buyers who have bought given the same fact pattern, or problems you know your product can resolve and seem to be a perfect fit. It seems logical that the new prospect should buy if they want their problem solved.
As an outsider to the buyer's unique cultural norms and mental models, you have no way of going into the team or Problem Space of the prospect because you don't live there with them. You don't know their internal politics, or the complete set of people issues that must be managed; you don't know exactly what is maintaining the problem that your product can solve - if the prospect knew how, the problem would have been solved ‘yesterday' (and why wasn't it??); you can't know all of the hidden agendas, the office politics, the historic problems that must be resolved before a purchasing decision can happen.
Click here to continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Should you wish to learn more about this, go to www.buyingfacilitation.com and purchase my ebook Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions.
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