Sales failure? It depends…sometimes you just have to learn how to say no
Posted on April 2, 2005
I think everybody faced at least few sales failures even if your are not a regular sales guy. You might not know, but actually you are making a sale each time you go out in the society. Even when you got that excellent programming job, you actually sold yourself.
Getting back to the sales failures, it worth saying a few words about the sales failures of the sales professionals. When you are in sales, every failure could mean a lot both personal and professional. Therefore is important to be aware of some techniques to change a failure into a big success. Lets take for example a bid for making a corporate site for a medium company: you just have a good offer for that particular site, but it gets turned down for lets say the price.
You already know that the price is one of the most important factors that could sale or not your contract. You’ve spent a lot of time negotiating with the technical guys the best and most economical approach, you have even cut down the margin. And your boss insists that you should bring in the client no matter what. Tricky, isn’t it?
Well, there are at least a few things that you could do just to make your already turned down offer a re-born winner:
First of all you should try to go and find out about the competition. Usually the client will be willing to let you know about the better bidding as he always hopes for a better offer from your side, even lower than the current competition. After you found out about the competition price range, go back to the technical team and try to find out in what ways they could lower the costs bellow the competition price.
Sometimes is not about the lower competition price, its just about budgets. Companies have strict budgets, and even if your offer is good but it gets bigger that the budgets, well, you are in trouble. Or sometimes the price is right, but a little to big to handle by the company. But there is something you could do: try to find out what features are not really a must and cut them down. If this is not enough simply propose a multi phase project. Its simple, you just have to split the project in phases and talk the client into doing them one by one. Usually there is no need to have everything from the beginning.
What if your price is simply too high? You tried cut the unnecessary stuff, you have split the project in phases but is still too high? Well, just look for parts of the project that could be done by somebody else at a better price. Sometimes is natural if you know best to do the design to leave the programming stuff to a specialized company. There is no point in leaving the project if you can still win a part of it and outsource the other.
Sometimes you realize that winning the project could bring you more advantages than just the simple price. In that case, try to put some numbers behind these advantages. Is your client willing to write a testimonial? Well, this is free promotion, how much would you pay for such a thing? Is your client likely to bring in some other clients? How much will you win by having the other clients? Just add these numbers and see if the advantages are not more important than the price difference…
Still not enough? Well there is one more thing. Maybe the most important one: learn how to say no. Sometimes just investing more time to gain that fantastic client will actually make you miss important opportunities. Or maybe you are simply not prepared yet to handle that type of client. Move along, your business is not actually to make the sales, but to actually make the best sale for your company. So if this client is not the best sale in town, focus on what’s more important, the next golden plated client.
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