When Chasing Sales Becomes Wasting Sales

We all been there, spend hours attending the meetings, given the presentations, prepared the proposal and then after all this personal investment, what appeared to be a certain big deal now starts to look increasingly shaky.

Its happened to every salesperson I know and its an emotional roller coaster that we could all do without. Coming to terms with the facts that what looked like the best bit of business you've done in months is now a dead duck is one of the hardest asks in the sales game.

The Danger

And for some salespeople it becomes their Achilles heel, the stone that they perish on. I have seen pipelines full of dead ducks and salespeople unwilling to give up the ghosts. So when should you give up the fight and how can you tell the still genuine opportunities from fruitless possibilities.

Lets consider three contributing factors:

1. Time

Just after you have demonstrated the value of your product is when prospect's interest is at its highest. Every day that goes by after this, their interest starts to wane, why? because they start to retain less of the sales communication and other more urgent in-house priorities rear their ugly head so before you know it, your sales message has lost much of its impact and opportunity to close the deal becomes less and less as the days and weeks go by.

2. The Prospect

The honesty of the prospect plays a big role in whether the opportunity remains live. This can be a difficult prospect to grasp for a lot of salespeople. The prospect appreciates that the salesperson has invested a lot of time and effort and in may cases may have given a strong impression to the salesperson that a sale was imminent. When the situation changes, the prospect often feels guilty particularly now as they have also developed a strong rapport with the salesperson. So rather than say no, its not going to happen they continue to say maybe. The seller perceives this maybe to mean the sale is still live when in reality this is now not the case.

3. Emotional Attachment

When any of us invest a lot of our energies and time in achieving a goal in this case a sale, we form an emotional attachment with that goal. Even when the facts tell us that this goal is no longer possible, our human nature makes it very difficult to let go. Our instincts makes us want to avoid what we perceive as rejection. In the sales arena, this is even more difficult because not only do we have to admit this perceived defeat to ourselves but we also have admit it to our colleagues and sales manager. The perceived humiliation (I use the term very loosely) is a public one. In this instance the normal successful traits of the salesperson actually become destructive because they don't allow the seller to admit that this particular game is up.

Knowing when to get out

The key component in knowing when to give up is the ability to look at each opportunity objectively, being able to evaluate the facts as they appear and being able to ask the prospect the hard questions. When a deal begins to go pear shaped and the prospect start to renege on commitments made you now need to accept that a sale is increasingly unlighted unless the prospect can provide prove otherwise. Explain to the prospect that your time is valuable and that you will need commitment before you invest any more with respect to this opportunity. Giving the prospect an easy out can be in both your interests as it allows the prospect to save face but more importantly allows you to concentrate your efforts on genuine sales opportunities.

Move On

Top salespeople are extremely greedy with their time and are only interested in talking to prospects that want to do business. They understand that their time is much better spent prospecting and qualifying new sales opportunities rather than chasing hopeless causes.