Time Kills All Deals

Intro: You’re listening to The Sales Focus Podcast. Your go-to for developing high-performing teams, next level sales skills, and real results. It’s time to get focused.

Welcome back to The Sales Focus Podcast. I’m your host, Tony Horwath, founder and CEO of Sales Focus.  I try to give valuable information to new salespeople or even experienced salespeople that may be going through a struggle. I use my experience of over 30 years of selling products and services to provide you with some valuable tips and tools that you may actually use. There’s so much information out there now on the Internet. Everybody can put together an AI chart that says, this is the best way to sell, and these are the greatest training tools out there. Well, I will tell everyone, if you want to be good in sales, there are some basic things you need to know, and that’s what we’re going to go over in this podcast today.

One focus we’re going to talk about today is follow-up. Follow-up is essential to find success in the selling process. When I talk to new salespeople, rejection is the hardest thing that they deal with. So when you’re talking about rejection, that means every time you follow up, you may be getting ghosted. You may be getting rejected. You may be getting a maybe. What’s the worst answer you can get in sales? Maybe. There are really two answers you want. You want a yes, obviously, or you want a no.

Maybes kill salespeople. I always tell my sales team, I use a lot of sayings in my business, but one saying that I use all the time is that time kills deals. What does that mean? Meaning, if you’re not following up, if you’re not providing feedback and information to your prospects, someone else is doing it. More than likely, whatever you’re selling, there’s someone else out there that’s selling it as well, and they believe their product or service is just as good or better than yours.

The truth is, when you follow up, what you have to be able to do in your follow-up process is to provide information, or valuable information, on every follow-up. It’s not just, hey, touching base, wanted to see how you’re doing, if your decision process is moving along. It’s, hey, I was thinking about what that solution was that we talked about, and I had a similar customer that we were able to really help. I’m sending you this case study about this customer to show you how we help them. That’s a great follow-up.

It typically takes, typically takes, between five to 12 follow-ups in order to close a deal. Sometimes, it may be much, much more, but sometimes, you get ghosted. Sometimes, people don’t respond, and it has to do a lot of times with timing, meaning, I know I get emails all day long, every day, about people who want to sell me things. First off, if the email doesn’t resonate with me, if it doesn’t say to me, hey, I have an interest in this, then I’m not going to follow up at all, or I’m not going to respond to them. But even if it does, typically I have a lot of things going on in my schedule. And more than likely, I’m going to forget about it. And if it doesn’t come the next day or the day after that, I’m going to completely forget about it. So following up is a method and a process that every sales team or sales individual has to put in their portfolio. Time kills deals. It really does.

Now, selling something that has a long sales cycle, we’ve had programs or clients we’ve had to sell over a period of 18 months. That’s going to take a lot more than 5 to 12 follow-ups, but typically, that’s ongoing conversations. If you’re having ongoing conversations with your prospects, that means that they’re engaged. That means that they believe, at least somewhat, that there is a value that you’re able to bring to their organization. The difference is if you’re just sending out, hey, touching base, hey, wanted to follow up with you, hey, wanted to see what your next step is, then you’re really just kind of bothering them more than anything else. And I want you to think about if someone is selling to you, what would make you respond to them? Typically, it’s because you’re showing, hey, I care about what we talked about. I identified a need. We talked about something that you had, maybe a pain point that we were able to solve, and I wanted to follow up and talk about it again based on this criteria. Not just, hey, I need to sell you today because it’s the last day of the month. I get that part, but it’s really more about, hey, I wanted to follow up because I really do believe in what I’m selling.

Follow-up is key to every salesperson. When I look at young salespeople, they really lack in this area. They’ll do one follow-up, two follow-ups, probably not hear from the client or the prospect, and immediately, they go back, right? They forget about that because a new lead came out, so now they’re going to chase the new lead. And that happens again. They’re going to follow up, they’re going to follow up, and then that lead goes back into the CRM, maybe never to be found again. Those are not lost leads. The problem is you don’t have a process in place that allows you to consistently and constantly follow up with a value proposition where they can see, hey, I really do need to have this conversation.

When you’re having a conversation with someone, your job as a salesperson is to qualify them, to identify a need, and to provide them value. That’s so important when you do have your initial conversation because the information that you can gather from that allows you to have intelligent follow-ups with those organizations, meaning if you have a conversation with them, and you’re selling your product or service, but you haven’t really identified what their need is or you haven’t identified the value that you can bring to their organization, it’s much more difficult for you then to follow up with a solution or with, hey, we helped another client similar to yours and we want to help you as well. Right. It leaves you kind of exposed because really the only thing that you have at that point in time is trying to get back on a phone call to be able to ask them more questions. So qualifying, properly qualifying on the initial call allows you to set up a sequence of intelligent follow-up conversations.

Remember, time kills deals. If you’re not doing it, someone else is going to be reaching out to that customer. And customers are so busy. They’re inundated with so many emails and phone calls and propositions about how much, you know, how someone else can make their business run better, run more effectively, reduce costs, all those things we’ve talked about in the past.

So if you truly believe in what you’re selling and you truly have qualified the buyer, understanding that they have a need, they have a budget, they’re looking to solve a problem, and you believe that your solution, your product or service, can solve that problem, that’s when you really need to absorb what they’re saying, understand what you can provide to them, and start the constant communication and follow-up of how can we get to the close. Remember, five to 12 times. If it’s a longer sales cycle, sometimes it’s longer than that. You could have conversations 15, 20, 30 times with a prospect before you get to the close.

The quality of your follow-up is a direct result on how many deals you’re going to close. As a professional salesperson, obviously you have to be used to people not responding to you and or rejecting you. Rejection, getting a no, is okay. Getting a maybe, I’ll think about it, that’s probably not where you want to be as a salesperson because you’re going to constantly chase that person without getting a real answer or getting a real direction of which way to go. If you’re getting maybes, that means you’re either not qualifying them properly or you’re not providing them enough value.

So think about what you’re doing as a sales professional. Think about how many times you do, you reach out to someone to follow-up with them and think about what it really takes in order to be a top-notch, qualified sales professional. Until next time, Tony Horwath with Sales Focus. For more information and more tips, hit our website at salesfocusinc.com. Thank you.