Just like the watched kettle never seems to boil, staring and wishing and hoping at a sales pipeline isn’t going to make it burst forth with leads that sell themselves. “You can’t sit back and hope that your deals close. But you equally can’t sit and anxiously stare at your opportunity report, nor can you badger your prospects every day for an update,” says sales and marketing strategist Matt Heinz. “The first is unproductive, the second may very well be counterproductive.”
How do you keep things moving when the ball seems to be in the court of an unresponsive buyer? Heinz offers these suggestions:
- Do your prospect’s work for them. If you’re waiting for them to make a decision, have you given them concrete options to choose from? Could you enumerate or further detail (in part to demystify and simplify) next steps or decisions to be made?
- Further quantify the problem and opportunity cost of not acting. The longer your prospects wait to say yes, the slower progress and results will come on their end. Sometimes you need to be the voice of focus and precision on their behalf, so that they understand the true cost of delay.
- Follow up with something completely different. Send a note of congratulations on recent company news, or comment on a recent piece of content the company has published. Even sending a link to an upcoming sporting event you know they like can help get a response.
- Build more pipeline. Too often, the biggest problem sellers have isn’t converting their existing pipeline. It’s not having enough pipeline in the first place. Divert that anxiety over existing deals into cultivating and qualifying new ones.
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