By Greg Winteregg, CEO
Don’t close them all
Yes, you read that right. There are definitely prospects out there that you DON’T want to sell. If you have been in sales for any length of time you can definitely remember the person you closed that you wish you hadn’t You know the one; they pay you and then they are nothing but trouble.
It’s never right.
They call you day and night with complaint after complaint. Then you give them the world and they put a bad review online.
When this happens it’s always good to take a moment and make sure that the product or the service was exactly as promised; but, I’m sure you’ve heard this before, twenty percent of the population is trouble. So most people are good to know and some are not.
How does this apply to what you do on a daily basis?
While prospecting, interviewing/qualifying and then handling objections to close you must keep your eyes wide open and observe what is going on with the prospect. If they are being hyper-critical, hard to communicate with and routinely making you wrong or pointing out flaws in you or others around you for efforts to help them then I suggest you consider walking away.
Now I understand that this seems counter-intuitive to you helping your company expand and making a paycheck for yourself and your family, but let’s think about it.
How much of your time is this prospect chewing up? You gather data to answer one question and then they come up with a new one that hadn’t been mentioned before. You try to answer that one but they aren’t returning phone calls. Then when you do get them on the phone they make a remark that leaves you in doubt as to if they even like you or the product/service. Or they say they can get it cheaper somewhere else after you trying to please them for three weeks.
So here is my rule
The moment you quit caring about the prospect and are just ‘going for the close,’ it’s time to walk away. If they have pushed you beyond your range of tolerance then walk away. You’ll respect yourself in the morning and you’ll probably start closing again immediately.
Selling is about helping but you can’t help them all.
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