Stalled sales
One of our founders, Melissa shares a couple of her proven, all-star sales secrets with us for when you’re in a strategic sales environment and the sale is stalled. If you know her, this won’t be a surprise … be clear on the outcome you want to achieve, plan ahead of time and have great questions ready to roll.
Once you’ve been around the traps a few times, you soon see that It’s the questions you have up your sleeve to get the objections on the table or gain insight into how you move forward with the sales process that really changes the game.
Getting objections on the table
For many salespeople this is the freeze or fear zone, the customer says ‘We can’t because …’ or ‘We don’t like x’, agghhh, a thinly-disguised, very polite thanks but no thanks. The wizened amongst us know that actually the opposite is true – getting a deeper understanding of the client’s concerns is awesome! You can either acknowledge they’re correct and your offering isn’t the right fit, or if it is, you can now have a focused conversation on that.
The worst outcome is to get upset and close the door. The best is to acknowledge you’re not the right fit and move on to one that’s a much better match (a bit like dating actually!), or you’re able to gain better insight into your customer and work with them to layout and discuss each of their concerns.
Be brave and ask things like:
For us to move forward with this, what roadblocks do you see?
What concerns do you have about this proposal?
What are some of the ‘less than ideal’ conditions you’re seeing here?
What questions or concerns have any of your colleagues raised?
Then they’re on the table, you can work to get a good understanding of these concerns, share insights or develop mitigation steps with the customer, and move forward with those now resolved.
Moving forward
If you’ve got a person who’s stalling or blocking the process, but is a key decision-maker or influencer in the process, sometimes those are the skills that make them great at their role, but make it hard for you to progress things. So it’s about working with them to understand their role and what a win looks like for them, and to understand what the barriers are. That can take time, Melissa suggests this goodie …
“If this (whatever the barrier or block is) wasn’t an issue, what would the next step be?”
or
“If this (whatever the barrier or block is) wasn’t an issue, what would need to happen for us to be presenting a recommendation to X to proceed” (or whatever the final step in getting the green light is).
or another version of these. Ultimately you want the contact to tell you themselves what’s going on, as on the outside we can make all kinds of assumptions using our past experiences, our take on them, their organisation etc, when reality may be quite different. Having that line of sight as to what’s next enables you to prepare, and it can get the stallee (new word?!) to shift their own thinking forward too.
Kia waimarie (good luck)!
