5 Things You Are Doing That Create Resistance

Competing Without a Relationship: An RFO shows up in your inbox. Or you happen to make the call right as your dream client begins to evaluate potential partners. The point is, you’re late to the party. It’s tough to compete from behind, and it is even tougher without relationships. There is one excellent play here: demonstrate the massive value that changes the evaluation and gives you time to develop the relationship. Without being known, liked, and trusted, you create resistance to a deal—even when and if you have the right solution.

Pushing Through the Process: Your dream client is moving fast. Or maybe you need to close a deal. So you decide to compress the sales cycle as much as you can. You try to cram too much into a single meeting. You do shoddy work developing your solution. You work to get the final commitment as quickly as possible. But moving forward in your process without considering where the buyer is in their process generates resistance. Slow down, go faster.

Skipping Stages: A derivation on the prior point. One way to try to go fast is to skip whole steps in your sales process. Why worry about the consensus building when you skip right to the presentation? Why worry about connecting value to your price when you can submit your proposal and pricing? The resistance you generate by skipping whole steps is complicated. Sometimes the resistance is to due to getting the solution wrong. Sometimes it’s the lack of consensus. Other times it’s just looks like you are a peddler hawking goods. Do what you know is right and create the value that is built into every stage of your process.

Pushing Product: Just pushing product is enough to create resistance. Your dream client has seen and heard it all. Features. Benefits. Yeah. Who cares? Your dream clients don’t, that’s for sure. Pushing your product isn’t value creation. The resistance you generate is caused by the fact that pushing product subtracts value. Create a higher level of value.

Dropping the Ball: If you want trust, you can’t drop the ball. You want resistance to “yes?” Do the things that violate trust like failing to keep your promises. If you say you are going to do something, even something as small as a phone call or an email, you have to do. The resistance you generate is caused by your dream client’s concern that you can be counted on to deliver.