Last week was a bad week for me sales wise. Two prospects that I thought had a great chance of converting into actual clients turned me away. I didn’t invest too much time on either of them, but invested enough to feel lousy about it.
Whenever I lose a deal, no matter how early in the process, I try to learn from it. Here are the lessons I picked up this time around:
1. Show value in explicit, measurable terms. In one case, the prospect was gung ho to work with me, or so I thought. So I got sloppy. I failed to ask enough questions to drill down into the costs of his problem – in business (e.g. make more money) and emotional (e.g. feel better) terms. I took his enthusiasm as a good enough sign to skip this step and assume he was ready and willing to buy. Big mistake! A week later when we spoke again, he seemed much less enthusiastic. By then, it was too late to remind him of the costs of not moving forward – because we never had that conversation.
2. Keep the pipeline full. My marketing strategy is based on attracting prospects in good times and bad, by being visible. You never know when you are going to lose a couple of solid prospects and have nothing. It’s important to be visible in your entire target market, so you get a stream of receptive prospects coming to you (or being receptive to your call). This requires executing marketing tactics to get in front of prospects in ways that they perceive as valuable, and then following up with more and more value-laden materials. The best way to do this is by educating prospects with things like speeches, articles, executive briefs, demos, free assessments, etc.
3. Keep a can-do attitude. After shaking the rejection off, I went back to marketing again. If anything, two simultaneous rejections spurred me on. So I advertised a free tele-marketing seminar this week, and got 30 people to join – from 4 countries. This will result in more projects and sales for me.
4. Start where you are. The best place to find your next client is from your current and past clients. These people are much more likely to give you referrals (if you ask right), or to hire you for follow on work. Sure enough, this week a long-time referral source of mine ended up leading me to a deal that could be worth more than twice as much as the two lost deals combined!
What have you learned from lost sales?
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While I am not in charge of sales – what I have learned is that no matter how well we know our products – we have to learn how to tune into what the prospect is hinting at but not really saying and plug our solutions into those needs. Our lost sales (on the software side – web-based middleware / quasi open-sourced i.e. source comes with purchase) resulted from us talking about the features and benefits without learning what the potential buyer really needed out of us.
April 30th, 2004 at 4:36 pm
Andrew, you mention that you get your most referrals from current and past clients if you ask the right way. My question is what is the best way to ask for referrals? My partner and I have established a very nice service for businesses in a particular industry and we have had trouble getting sales. We know we have a great service but have not been able to make enough sales. We tried asking the clients we currently have to refer business to us and we would give them $XX off of their current cost or dropping their subscription rate XX% and nothing has worked. What kinds of things should we offer to our clients to entice them into helping us make more sales? Please advise. Thanks!
April 30th, 2004 at 4:45 pm
I completly agree with keeping your pipeline full. It’s the most important point. We survive from our prospects that turn into customers. And our customers are the people who support our business and life.
I like this Blog a lot. Keep up the excellent posts.
May 2nd, 2004 at 12:46 am
webmonster:
Instead of giving them a discount, give them a bonus. Give them free service or give them money…a percentage of the sale.
May 2nd, 2004 at 1:04 am
On the getting referrals bit – when we finish a site for a client we post them a bottle of bubbly with our label on it, a “thank you and congratulations”. The gesture is really appreciated and we generally have no trouble getting referrals, and we don’t offer monetary payments or discounts to get them. If you look after clients and surprise them with little incentives, referrals are not hard to come by!
May 2nd, 2004 at 2:06 am