By Milestone|3January 29, 2020

You ever wonder why some clients who definitely need your product, are not buying your product? We’ve all been there before – we meet with the client, who definitely has a need for our offering and after our meeting, we expect the deal to close. Yet, no deal ever gets signed. Why is that? Well, it could be many reasons, but let’s examine some of the most common reasons:

1. During your meeting, who was talking more – yourself or the client? Seriously! If you are talking more in a meeting, are you finding out about the client? Finding out about their needs, their desires, their concerns or goals? When we go to client meetings, we should spend time in understanding the client’s situation, and what is on their mind. We already know our offering; our job in a client meeting is to feel how the client feels about it. This way, we can work on making the client the most comfortable to proceed with our offering. For example, when a client shows concern about your offering, try to understand why that concern exists. This way, we can focus on relieving that concern.
2. Are you talking to the right person? Seriously! So often, sales professionals are not speaking to the decision-maker, nor do they even know who the decision-maker is. In these instances, the information we receive may not be reflective of what we need to know for a favourable decision to happen. What does the decision-maker see? How does the decision-maker feel? Why would the decision-maker feel that way? Now, I know it is not always possible to meet the decision-maker. However, at a minimum, we need to understand how the buying process will be made. (i.e. “Who would it involve?”) To take it another step forward, we could ask our contact person for their advice on how to make the offering the most suitable to the decision-maker based on their experience working with the decision-maker. But some of you might be reading this and thinking “He/She may not be able to provide useful advice…” If that was the case, please re-read what the first words of this paragraph are.
3. Did you ask to move forward? Seriously! Sometimes, we have to ask to move forward in order to get some progress with the sales process. This works best for those who are mostly sure, but have not absolutely decided yet – while they are “sitting on the fence”, we can take the opportunity to encourage their progression. Should they have any objections, this would also be a good time to know. We’d rather work out their objections now, rather than these objections growing in their mind and becoming more complicated than they imagine. You have had the same experience before. If you ever walked away from almost buying something – after you leave, you start rationalizing all the reasons in your head as to why you were right to not have made that purchase. And then you find more reasons until you are absolutely convinced that your decision to not buy was the best decision. That may have been very different if the salesperson walked up to you before you left.

Could there be other reasons? Of course – there can be an infinite amount of reasons why clients are not buying from you. But let’s move forward and see all the reasons why clients would buy from us. And then ask ourselves – where would those clients be? More on this, in our next blog.

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