Cutting to the chase

OK, this topic is a mix of some of the other things I said I would write about, but it is top of mind for me at the moment.

In general, sales individuals like to prolong a discussion with a prospect, in my experience. They find it unnerving when I walk into a conversation and quickly drive to why we shouldn't be talking to the prospect. They want to hold on to some glimmer of hope that there is an opportunity when clearly there isn't. And the prospect might cooperate in continuing having a discussion. Both sides get the sense that they are accomplishing something, even though the end result is realistically not a sale/purchase.

Sales is hard, and getting harder all the time. In our business, and I'm sure in yours, we can't waste time on conversations that won't go anywhere in the long term. So my opinion is to cut to the chase as quickly as we can. If we find a hurdle, and the inability to jump over it means the race is over, let's call the race over and move on instead of spending a bunch of effort trying to get over the hurdle when if we are honest the hurdle is too large. Our time is much better spent finding prospects where we do fit and where the hurdles don't exist or we have a better chance of jumping over them.

Prospects can find that approach just as unnerving as the sales person. In the role of participaiting on various sales calls as a sales manager, that's the stuff I try to find and address as early in the sales cycle as possible.

For example, one of our clients has a product that requires a 7MB download into the user's web browser. For some applications of this technology, that is clearly not problematic. For others, it can be a large concern. The typical salesperson will tend to ignore this and let the sale go on, and then all of a sudden much to far down the road it bites you in the ass and becomes a show stopper. So if it is a show stopper, what prevents us from addressing this very early?

To do this, I always try to present the benefit of whatever it is we are talking about. There is a darn good reason this particular client uses a plug-in architecture - and it is a huge benefit to certain types of applications. But there are cases where the benefit doesn't outweigh the downside. So I prefer to lay it on the table early on and get their objections out, understand how they will decide which side of the line they will fall with this issue and drive a decision on the issue. Yes, this is too big of an issue - great, let's not waste each other's time. Nope, not an issue - great, let's continue. Maybe - we need more info and it depends on some other stuff - great, what more do you need to decide and when you have that, how will you decide.

In a previous entry I mentioned a SI we were attempting to recruit. They work in the Government space, so a particular standard is important to their customers. Our client only partially supported the standard. Our salesperson wanted to do a demo, start trying to find a project we could work together, etc. To me that made no sense - why should we take their time and ours if the standards issue was going to ultimately be a show stopper - so I pointedly drove the conversation there - is this or is it not going to be a problem. In this case the result was good - they have clients that don't care that much, and what we have to offer overcame the downsides...so we continued.

Not driving to the 'how will this be funded?' question is another natural problem area here. One of the solutions we sell for a client is usually about a $500k sale. When I probed around how they will pay for it, our sales person said they stated that 'if it fits our needs, we'll find a way to pay for it'. Even for a large company, I find that hard to believe. A half million dollar sale needs to be in a budget because it is an agreed priority - most companies don't just find that kind of discretionary IT spend. Sure enough, we got well down the road and invested a lot in the sales cycle and near the end got slammed with the 'well, we can only afford $150k'. Had we pushed hard on that when the fuzzy funding answer intitially came up, we probably would have decided to walk. Even if 'we'll find it' is a valid answer for that company, we need to know hard details around what exactly has to happen for them to find $500k outside normal budget process. If the prospect can't answer that, we should really think hard about proceeding, and should certainly express our concerns...we have a business to run as well.

So, I know it is hard, but next time you sense something that you think might be a show stopper, try to train yourself to attack it right away. Forgetting about it, burying it, not addressing it will most likely lead to a lost sale anyhow - so you are better off getting over the loss now, not later!