Why Fast Is Slow

If you want to win business faster, you need to slow down.

The more you rush your buyer, the more they feel that the deal you want is about your gain—not what is most important to them.

Going too fast in discovery can cause the contacts you are calling on to feel as if what they are saying isn’t important to you, that you don’t really care, and that you aren’t going to take their real needs into consideration.

Rushing through the process and foregoing the consensus-building necessary for your dream client to get the internal “yes” from their team prevents them from giving you the “yes,” that means you won the business.

There aren’t a lot of great reasons to rush to a solution. A couple of extra hours deepening your understanding allows you to build better solutions, and solutions your prospective client can agree to buy. A lack of time invested here slows the process.

One of the single worst attempts to speed up the sales process is to present a proposal and pricing before you have built the value and before you’ve built a preference for you and your solution. You aren’t speeding towards a “yes.” You are speeding straight into a dead end.

A sales process and the buyer’s process have one important fact in common: they’re both a series of conversations and commitments.

Skipping the needed conversations in an attempt to get to a close faster will only get you to “no” faster.

When you avoid asking for some of the commitments you and your dream client need to make together, you not only slow the process, you make it exceedingly more likely that they won’t buy from you.

A fundamental underinvestment of time with your dream client will actually increase the time it takes to win deals, if you can win them at all, having failed to develop the relationships, and having failed to create enough value to be preferred.

These are some of the reasons why fast is slow and slow is fast. Slow is also a better strategy for winning, and it’s a better way to compress your sales cycle when fast means shoddy work, poor relationships, too little value creation, and skipping the necessary conversations and commitments.