Getting To No
A couple of weeks ago I finally sold a program to someone I had been prospecting for some time, close to 20 months. In the end it was a excellent sale, hard to say if it was a typical sale, but certainly one that represents a part of the way some sales go, and eventually turn out.
One of the familiar characteristics of this sale was the fact that I heard “no” as many time as I heard “yes”. Of course the business that made it gratifying was not so much getting the “yes” at the end, but the level of value the “no’s” brought to the sale along the way.
This is not one of those feel excellent post that will tell you to embrace the “no”, or that every “no” gets you one step closer to a yes. What I want to highlight is that it is how you use those “no” to build value or go the sale along.
Hearing no should not come as surprise to anyone in sales. Sales by nature is not a linier process, it is a run of starts and stops that needs to be managed by able professionals, you. I guess of you are selling pizza slices at the mall food court that may not be the case, but in B2B sales it is a fact, anyone that say other wise is likely an order taker rather than a sales professional. Which in and of itself is not terrible, because if it was simple or simple, they wouldn’t need us.
So there two things to take advantage of here, first the simple one, is how to deal with the “no’s”. The second, perhaps less obvious, is how to specifically engineer “no’s”. This is a concept that many sales people often can’t or won’t fathom, but executed well, it could lead to a lot of opportunity to not only learn a lot while solidifying the sale, but also develop and underline entrust with he buyer.
We all know that selling is not pitching, if you have any doubts, read Jim Keenan’s Telling is Not Selling; and as you can glean from other posts by my fellow Sales Bloggers Union members, it is more about a conversation that leads to a mutually satisfying conclusion. Unfortunately buyers have been so conditioned by terrible sales experiences that they often are loath to open up straight away, before they have developed a level of entrust, or more accurately, we have earned entrust. One way to do that in sales is to listen, and of course to listen you have to question questions.
Now some questions will get you answers straight away, and those answers will help you because they provide information and guidance. But at era, prospects may be loath to answer certain questions, feel they may reveal too much information too ahead of schedule, perhaps feeling they would be at a drawback, or other reasons for holding back. So if you can question a question that you know will beg a “no”, one where you hypothesis about something specific, you will not only get your “no”, but often the buyer will go on to tell you, why not, and what they are in fact doing, thinking or plotting. Often this will go over and above what they may tell in response to a direct question.
Further, keep in mind that when you hear “no”, it is nearly always an invitation to question why not? What would have to be in house or what would have allowed them to say “yes”. So if you are comfortable with the fact that sales is a jagged line experience as opposed to a straight line, getting to “no”, can at era deliver more value that strictly hearing a bunch of “yeses” along the way, and still getting a “no” at the end.