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June 2009 ~ How Can "NO" Be A Good Answer?
By Jack Laurent
When it comes to the possible outcomes of a sales meeting with a prospect, most would agree that there are three possible outcomes; yes, no, and think it over. And when most salespeople rank these three possible outcomes in terms of desirability, it probably looks something like this:
1) Yes
2) Think It Over
3) No
This makes perfect sense. We definitely want a “Yes” answer, so this is the outcome we would rank #1. We definitely don’t want a “No”, so this is the answer we rank last. That leaves “Think It Over” as the middle choice. But let’s take a deeper look at “Think It Over”. How often does a “Think It Over” really turns into a “Yes”. While we can find isolated cases, it is very rare that a “Think It Over” turns into a “Yes”.
This type of prospect, called a thinkitover, is simply trying to be nice by not rejecting you. Prospects have the same subconscious fear of rejection that salespeople have. Because the thinkitover doesn’t want to hurt your feelings, they want to avoid telling you “No”, even though they’ve already made their decision.
But thinkitovers have two dangerous side effects. The first is that they give you the false sense of a healthy sales pipeline. If you start a folder for each thinkitover, after several months you have a full drawer, which looks pretty good. But this can rob you of the motivation required to make new prospecting calls. How? Because it’s easy to tell yourself that if only half of your thinkitovers turn into business, you’ll have a huge month. So you spend a couple hours looking for old co-workers on LinkedIn instead of prospecting.
The second way thinkitovers will cost you money is by turning you into a “professional visitor.” When you make the time to prospect, you have a choice between two different stacks of business cards. The stack on the left is thinkitovers. You feel like you know them because you’ve already had a business discussion with them, given them your sales pitch and they told you they would think it over. The stack of business cards on the right is prospects that you have never called on before, several of whom will probably say “No”.
Here’s where fear of rejection takes physical action. Too often your hand reaches for the stack of thinkitovers…the prospects that havealready decided not to buy your product, but they were just too nice to tell you that. Still, you call the thinkitovers because you have convinced yourself they are ‘warm’ leads. Nope. The real warm leads are the untouched business cards you got at last week’s networking event.
Why do so many of your leads end up in the thinkitover pile? Because you didn’t take control of the first sales meeting. You didn’t set the ground rules at the beginning of the sales meeting, and you are not using a sales system to lead the prospect to a definitive answer. If the prospect’s answer is going to be ‘”No” anyway, when do you want to know that; better to hear it now, or after 2 months of calling?
So, I’ll ask the original question in a different way; if we were to rank the three possible outcomes of a sales call, would it be fair to rank them as follows? :
1) Yes
2) No
3) Slow No…thinkitover…one that eats up your time and saps your energy to prospect for real opportunities
So don’t be afraid of hearing “No’. It’s OK. There are thousands of real prospects out there. What you should be afraid of is: “Looks great, I just need to think it over.”
This article was contributed by Jack Laurent, a BTM member and a member of BTM’s Power Panel of Advisors.
Jack is a sales coach and trainer with Achievement Dynamics, part of Sandler Training, the world’s largest sales training organization. He has trained groups on sales technique and personal performance mindset, and he was a National Merit Scholar at the University of Florida and earned his M.B.A. from Long Beach State.
www.AchievementDynamics.Sandler.com
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