When deals get delayed...

This was sent to me by Nicola d'Amato - superstar salesman in the Italian market - great info to share with y'all:


Not closing a sale "on time", is almost the same as losing
that sale.

You might think...

"Hey, if I closed the sale, that's great. It doesn't
really matter if I close it this month or next, as long
as it's for the same amount."

Well the truth is a sale delayed by days, weeks, or months
costs you.

It costs you because you have to expend extra selling time
and extra selling energy to close that deal. Energy that
could've gone into working other deals in your pipeline or
into prospecting for new deals. And also it costs you because you can't instantly replace
the revenue you expected to get from that deal.

Traditional selling mentality focuses on the need to "create
a sense of urgency" with your prospect.
Sometimes this can work. But it depends on the cause of the
delay.

If the delay is something beyond your ability to influence,
then doing things like cutting your bid don't speed up your
deal. All they do is tell your prospect that you are willing
to lower your bid, and then they'll demand it later when
they are ready to close.

The better approach is to shoot for an overflowing pipeline
of deals. If you have pipeline full of high quality prospects, with a
high likelihood of making a purchase from *you*, then you
don't have to worry when a deal or two gets delayed.

Now how do you get this pipeline of high quality prospects?

Well you have to be willing to do three things.

You have to be willing to spend more time prospecting than
you probably have in the past. You're going to need to make
more calls, send more letters, emails, LinkedInmails, gifts - whatever works.

You're going to need to sharpen your message so that you get
a higher hit-rate from your communications.

And you're going to need to throw away more weak leads.

You accomplish this by prospecting for pains that you can
solve, and by filtering the hits you do get through a
rigorous qualification process.

A high prospecting activity level focused on finding pains
you can solve combined with qualifying your leads against an
ideal customer profile will result over time in a pipeline
bursting with prospects inclined to purchase from you.

You'll be much more successful fixing your sales problems by
focusing on the decision of who to spend your sales time
with instead of worrying about how to create a sense of
urgency with a poor quality prospect.

Let's dial for dollars!