Is Your Sales Prospect A Great Fit For You?
Posted by
Chris Lang on Thu, Sep 30, 2023 @ 04:01 PM
As a sales person, I want to close everything. The CEO a couple of doors down wants steady growth through long term clients and not a revolving door of in and out projects. We have a philosophy that we would rather have 1 long term client than 10 short ones. It is with this in mind that we run a “Prospect Diagnostics” meeting. Sounds pretty fancy huh? Like you can find it under the hood of a car somewhere near the right front differential axel. I’ll break down the “Prospect Diagnostics” call to very simple terms, “Does this have potential to be a long happy relationship?”
Does the prospect have a need that warrants the use of YOUR product/service? Not only should the prospect have a need for a solution, you should be confident that your solution is better for the prospect than any others. If you are selling while knowing in the back of your mind that you aren’t the best fit, it will come through and your prospect will figure it out. If you aren’t the best fit tell the prospect and respect their and your time. As much as it stinks to walk away from a deal, it will sting much worse if they walk away from you after you invested a ton of time in them.
Does the prospect have a reasonable expectation of what you can deliver? Some prospects have very lofty goals in mind before they come to you. For me they usually take the form of a VP that is trying to put up huge numbers in a short amount of time.
Sales VP “I need to close 2 deals by the end of the calendar year”
Me: “How long is your sales cycle?”
Sales VP: “6 months”
Me: “You realize its November right?”
This Sales VP has the potential to run my team into the ground trying to hit numbers that can not be achieved. Even if my team does great, the client will be unhappy. Make sure the client’s goals are aligned with your teams goals so and everyone is pushing for the same thing.
Is This a Hospitable Place to Land? I like to think of this as the “gut feeling” part of the sales process. Does it seem like everyone involved is happy you are there? Do people seem to get along? Is there a disconnect between the people you will be working with? Does the left hand know what the right one is doing? I have friend in data storage sales. He worked on a deal for months to provide cloud data services to a major retail company. Everything was all set; all he had to do was run a very small test pilot which would be coordinated through a regional section of the IT department. Guess what? The IT manager that ran the region was golf buddies with the former vendor that my buddy ousted. You know what the report to the national IT director said? “This solution stinks and we should bring back the old group”. Talk to the influencers about what they think about your solution and make sure they are on board. You want to set your team up in a peaceful territory and not drop them in a mine field.
Will Cost Be an Issue? My firm isn’t a cheap option. When I would approach my CEO with price negotiation questions, he would say, “you get what you pay for”, “we are a Mercedes not a Ford”, “cheap does not equate to right”. As a new comer, it killed me to hear this when all I wanted was permission to drop the price and close the deal. That being said, it taught me a lesson very early. Tell your prospect the price, let them know why it costs that much and ask them if it is going to be an issue from a budget standpoint. I would love a Mercedes, but I can’t afford one. That doesn’t make a Mercedes a bad car. It makes me a bad prospect for a Mercedes dealer. Make sure that your prospect knows that they can’t have the Mercedes for Ford money.
I took a look at my opportunities from a couple of months ago and found that in one particular month I walked away from 50% of the potential clients I talked to. I hated it. Then again, if I didn’t walk away from those prospects they would have walked away from me or even worse, they would have signed a deal that didn’t work for either group, there would have been an early divorce and a former client saying how bad my company is. Unhappy former clients are bad for growth! Take time to think about your own company and how you align with your prospect. Good selling is not a matter of talking someone into a contract that they may or may not need. It is about having open, honest dialogue with a prospect and finding a win/win for everyone.