Let’s talk about sales since that is our primary focus. One version of “waiting” that a salesperson can engage in is waiting for prospects to change their minds.
Let’s have a look at the sales process in a bit of detail and see how a salesperson could possibly arrive at that conclusion. If a salesperson is waiting for the prospect to change their mind, they never made it to the Agreement step, the step where the prospect firmly decides to buy, and voices that decision.
In sales CPR, we work backward through the sales process to discover in which sales process stage the sale actually resides. In this instance, the salesperson probably thinks they made it through the Education step, and the prospect just decided, at that point, not to buy.
But the result of the Education step is that the prospect is inspired to take action to buy. That did not happen. So, it is obvious something got missed in the Education step.
The Qualification step could have been skimped on, also, and it often is. “Qualifying” is too often defined as “the prospect has the money.” It could have happened that the salesperson got the prospect up to qualifying, found out they could afford the product or service, and just went on from there.
But a major result of qualifying is knowing all the reasons the prospect should buy, from the prospect’s point of view.
Not knowing that, the salesperson is not going to know how to properly educate the prospect. Additionally, as part of qualifying, the salesperson should know how to save the prospect money and time, how to make them money, what problems the salesperson is solving for them, and how the salesperson’s product or service is supporting their goals.
The salesperson should also discover how long they have had their problems, and how long they’ve been trying to resolve them.
For any salesperson waiting for the prospect to change their mind, the safest route to recovery is for the salesperson to first, review their sales process, and make sure they fully understand it.
At SELLability, we have isolated the basic sales process which can be customized for any company. Then, the salesperson should review the sales process for that prospect, from the Prospecting step on up.
They should re-contact that prospect and run through the Interview step once more. Make sure, before they come out of that step again, that trust has actually been achieved—which is the end result for that step.
In any case…stop waiting and start acting!
