Discover the power of turning down the wrong clients to build a successful and integrity-driven sales career.
You sit down with your prospective client. The conversation is like other meetings you routinely experience. Over the course of a half hour, you learn a lot about your contact, their business, and what they need to do in the future. Unfortunately, you discover your contact isn’t a good prospect for your company or your solution. Despite this, they want to buy from you, but you are certain you cannot produce the result they need, even if you can come close.
If you never say no to a prospective client, we can make an argument that you are harming some of them. With the pressure from sales leaders who care more about their pipeline coverage, it’s tempting to keep the opportunity in the pipeline, instead of removing and replacing it with something that would be a better fit.
Choosing Integrity Over Sales Numbers
Occasionally, a prospective client wants to buy what we would call the legacy approach. Once the client discloses this, the conversation is over, and we offer to refer them to one of our competitors who can help them with the training they need, even though we believe they should adopt a modern sales approach.
It’s better to not take the business than to fail the client by producing suboptimal results or deal with constant complaints because a client isn’t right for what you do. By not taking their business, you maintain your integrity, and by giving the contact the names of a couple of competitors who are a better match, you help them the only way you can. Once you know you are not right for your contact, you need to say no to their business.
Identifying Mismatched Client Expectations
Sometimes your prospective client is right for you. In the industry I grew up in, there were a number of reasons a potential client would not be right for my company. One reason I would say no is if the prospective client paid below-market wages, making it all but impossible to provide them the people they needed. There was no need to go any further in the sales conversation after I discovered this. When a competitor took the client, I knew they were going to face a heavy lift to acquire the labor they needed when the employees could easily make more money working elsewhere.
Some of my contacts at these companies were polite and professional people, challenged by a financial constraint that made their work life a lot more difficult than it had to be. When the client isn’t for you, you walk away. In some scenarios, you are not responsible for introducing your contact to a competitor, who would face the same constraint that would prevent you from taking the client’s business. I made it my business to help clients in this situation increase their pay rate, which sometimes worked.
Protecting Your Team from Toxic Clients
In your time in sales, you will find dream clients. You will also bump into nightmare clients. You know what IQ is, but you may not know that there is something we call MQ, or a moral quotient. The lower the moral quotient, the more you can be certain your contact and their team are not going to be good partners. If you take clients that will treat your team poorly or make it difficult for them to succeed, you are harming your team and making their lives miserable. This is true even if you have moved onto another client while your team is being beaten up by some ogre with just enough power to use it poorly. If you know the client would be a monster, walk away.
If your client asks you for a kickback or some other crime, the mismatch with your MQ and your client's MQ means you walk. There is no reason to take a client that will be a problem for your company and the team that is responsible for taking care of them.
Avoiding Problematic Business Relationships
There are other reasons to say no to a client. Let’s start with not paying their bills on time. No one wants to have to badger the client to pay their invoices. We can also add unrealistic expectations, with the contact asking you and your team to perform miracles. When what your client expects is the equivalent of parting the Red Sea, you are better off letting your competitor have the client. If there is anything that is going to be a problem in the future, you should deal with it in the sales conversation, and if there is no resolution, you refuse the business and find a better client. Overall, you want more dream clients than nightmare clients.
If by chance you have nightmare clients in your client portfolio, you would do well to replace them with better clients.
Upholding Sales Ethics and Client Selection
If you never say no to a prospective client, you are certain to have problems with the ones you should have walked away from. You will also spend some part of your time with your team, listening to them complain and asking you to interfere with your contacts and ask them to make changes.
You don’t need to take every client you pursue. When you are wrong for your client or they are wrong for you, you are better off moving on and allowing some salesperson who doesn’t know better to take the client. It will be a learning experience for that greenhorn, one that will teach them that not every client is a client you want.
You maintain your integrity by saying no to the prospective clients that you don’t want in your portfolio. The better the quality of your clients, the better your relationships, some of which you will have for your entire time in sales.
