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One of the biggest mistakes a sales person can make is holding on to a lost cause. I call it the “Lenny Syndrome.” We all remember Lenny from ‘Of Mice and Men’ and how he held, hugged and loved that puppy literally to death. Salespeople can do the same thing. A sale goes south, for whatever reason, and the next few weeks are WASTED grasping at the lifeless corpse it has become.
Following this process gets the closure you need to move on, as well as, discovering what you can do to improve yourself and your company’s selling efforts. This combination ALWAYS leads to NEW sales in the future if we apply what we have learned. The results are multiple positives from one negative situation.
You will find times, when a sale is lost; the prospect will give you almost total disclosure as to the reason. But when they don’t it is even more important to find out why. A number of reasons ALWAYS exist that will make the customer reticent about telling you, but there are other times it can be for the most undignified of situations:
I am not saying that these are always the circumstances, but you need to keep the “worse angels” perspective in mind. Besides it is more than likely a combination of things that led to the decision and not one lynch pin.
The key to getting an honest answer is to take your prospect off the hook. Remember you have spent a significant amount of time with these people and have probably developed some level of a relationship. They already feel awkward because of the circumstances surrounding the situation so you need to be overtly gracious about the result.
Keep in mind that this information will benefit you 5 times as much as it could ever benefit your prospect so be sure to use that type of ratio in your handling of the prospect.
1) Always place the blame on yourself, examples include:
2) The prospect almost always bends over backward to tell you it was not your fault so now go on the offensive.
3) This is a crucial point. They may offer one or two ideas, but if the necessary sincerity is conveyed, the prospect will teeter on opening up and telling you the whole truth.
4) At this point the prospect has either opened up to you or they haven’t. They have told you pretty much all you are going to hear from them at this “sitting” so now it is time to downshift into apology mode again.
5) The prospect will probably express relief because you did not push too hard and were so self-deprecating about the results so they are MORE likely to talk to you in the future.
Now all you have to do is follow-up as promised. The result will be one or a combination of these items:
1) They will eventually tell you the whole story
2) They will become a customer in the future
3) They won’t ever tell you what REALY happened
4) They will say you are wasting your time
Any or all of these results are, at minimum, acceptable. Obviously we would prefer 1 and 2 more than 3 or 4 but the real key is in the self discovery. When we know the reasons, we can move forward and improve ourselves and maybe land this or a similar prospect the next time. We want to close sales but we will NEVER close every sale. Continual development of our sales ability is an active ALL the time process and the only thing that can help us become the sales professionals we aspire to be.
That’s it for today and remember you can either make sales or you can make excuses but you can’t do both!
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