A prospect comes along and expresses interest in working with you.
You get excited. It’s been a few months since you closed a deal.
The first call goes swimmingly. The client likes you. You like them. Things are looking good.
“I’ll turn this into a proposal and send it your way by tomorrow“, you say.
Feeling good, you fire over the proposal bright and early the next day, and….
Crickets.
You follow up. No reply. That’s weird.
You leave it a week and follow up again. You’re pretty sure the email must have gone to spam.
So you send one more email the following day asking if they got your other messages. This time, in a new thread just in case the old one is in the spam folder.
Finally, another week and a half later, you get a response:
“Thanks for your patience. We ended up going in another direction but we appreciate the time you spent with us.“
What went wrong?
It could be anything.
It could be your positioning. It could be the source of the lead. It could be your prices. It could be the scope. It could be the competition.
Really though, you’ll never know.
You’ll never know because you broke the cardinal sin of sales: rushing too quickly into a proposal.
You thought you heard them. You thought they liked you. You thought you were on the same page.
But there’s a good chance you missed something. You didn’t get a conceptual agreement going.
And so you sent a proposal that didn’t exactly fit their needs. That’s what happens when you try to rush through the sales process.
But to make things worse, you also broke the second cardinal sin: you didn’t walk them through the proposal over a live call.
Your initial sins could maybe have been forgiven if only you had booked a call to walk through your proposal.
Maybe your proposal would have missed the mark. But at least you’d be there to try and salvage things.
You would have been able to ask questions like, “Did this proposal meet your expectations based on what we discussed?”
But now, the prospect thinks you can’t solve their problem. Or they can’t afford your solution.
They don’t want to negotiate you down, so they look for other options.
There must be a better way to do things…
When I approach sales, my mindset is to be a co-buyer with the client. To shop my services with them to come up with a solution that feels like a home run for them.
Everything is treated as custom—even if they go for a productized service in the end.
I aim to get super clear on where they are today, where they want to end up, and the obstacles they’re facing between those two points.
That’s the transformation I sell.
But to truly understand the project, I then need to figure out what the value opportunity is so I can propose something appropriate.
And that, my friend, is a story for another day.
For now, I want you to remember two things:
- Slow down the sale.
You can’t in good faith put together a well-considered proposal if you’re in a rush. This is your opportunity to go slow and solve the real problems your prospect has. - Don’t send proposals by email.
No matter how tempted you are, just don’t. Walk them through it on a call because it’s your moral duty to make sure you understand their goals, obstacles, the value of achieving those goals, and how they plan to measure success.
If you do these two things, you’re well on your way to putting together more considered options that set your engagements up for success later on.
Slow… down… the… sale.
Your (good) clients will appreciate it.
—kevin
P.S. The doors are open again for the membership. You can go deep into topics like this with dozens of hours of recorded training, coaching, templates, and more. Sign up here: https://howtoselladvice.com/membership