WHERE'D THEY GO?

Joyce Kacin
Jun 10
2 min read

You represent your brand, your own or your employer’s, very well! You meet with clients and new prospects all the time. You present your solution in a clearly positioned way that demonstrates your strong value proposition and solves problems you KNOW these clients are actively looking to fix.

Your meetings have been great. Really great. You’ve developed a solid rapport and interactions are professional and congenial. They’ve given you their key areas of interest, the parameters of their budget, and the timing by which they’ll make a decision.

You prepare an on-point, compelling proposal.
You deliver your proposal with enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of working together.
You eagerly follow up.
~ time passes ~
They don’t pick up your call.
They don’t reply to your emails
They don’t provide feedback on your proposal.
They go dark. And the decision deadline passes.

While this is far from a professional way to conduct business, it happens all the time.

So, what changed?

Could be any number of things.

The person you’re talking to isn’t the only or the final decision maker and you don’t know what’s important to them.
They’ve had some change in direction and you’ve been left out of the loop.
They have a relationship with a different company and it’s stronger than you thought or even knew about.
Your proposal was only used as a comparison offer to review a preferred company or to negotiate better pricing with that company. It was never a real consideration.
They’ve had a budget cut.

All these circumstances SHOULD and CAN be overcome before you prepare your proposal. How? BY ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS.

Easy enough, right?

No!

So many business professionals want to ride the wave of goodwill with their prospects so they never ask probing and potentially uncomfortable questions. Questions that would reveal exactly where things stand in the buying process and exactly where you stand as a real contender for the business. That includes learning who the complete decision-making team is from those who research, recommend, evaluate, and finally sign a contract or letter of agreement. Each of those steps, whether performed by separate individuals or one single person, must be “won over” so to speak. Each step in the process is one that can move the proposal forward or take it off the table. If it’s taken off, you need to know where and how that happened.

An overlooked step in both sales and negotiations is ELICITING PUSHBACK. That means uncovering vulnerabilities. Not theirs, YOURS. Nothing goes from a first meeting to closing without some bumps. You need to prepare for them, uncover them, and elicit them whenever they are not apparent. Because they're always there. Only then can you address and overcome them. If you don’t, your prospect may not want to be the bearer of bad news or reveal their own lack of thoroughness.