If You Are Waiting for Your Prospect to Get Back with You

I just turned in the manuscript to my second book, The Lost Art of Closing. The book will published on August 8th, 2017, less than 10 months after the release date of my first book, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need.

The Lost Art of Closing is about gaining all the commitments you need to move from target to close, creating a preference for you and your solution the whole way through. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because too many salespeople struggle to gain the commitments they need. In many cases, they cede control of the process to their prospective client, hurting both parties in the process.

Your prospective client tells you they’ll get back to you with a time for a follow up meeting. You agree, deciding it’s okay to wait for them to call or email you. You have lost control of the process. You are now working on your client’s timeline, and that means it’s going to take you longer to win their business—should they get back to you—and you are going to postpone the time it takes  to provide them with the best results to win.

How about this one: Your prospect tells you to email them your proposal and pricing. You believe you are serving your prospective client by providing them with what they ask for. And then . . . nothing. Silence. Your phone calls aren’t returned, your emails garner no response. Your prospective client may be busy, and it is possible that something came up. It’s also possible that after looking at your pricing without you there to remind them of the value you create, they decided to do nothing. You might have produced a different outcome, but you would have had to do something different.

Maybe you never emailed your pricing and proposal. You showed up, walked your dream client through the proposal, justified the delta between your price and what they were investing before. Then, as you were finishing, your dream client said, “We’d like to take a few days and look this over. We’ll get back to you.” Maybe they will. It’s possible. It sometimes happens. But maybe it won’t.

If you are waiting for your dream client to get back to you, you have made a mistake. You didn’t gain the commitment you needed when you should have.