An approach I guarantee to help you win more often…

Simply close the client’s file!  You will win whatever happens next! 

Do you have proposals that you have sent where prospects are not getting back to you? Not returning your calls, responding to your voicemails or replying to your emails?  Perhaps it’s the common stall…”that sounds good Chris, can you call me in 2 weeks after I run it past John?”  Or maybe, it’s as simple as the prospect not keeping their side of the arrangement.

In all of these scenarios we can find ourselves chasing the sale and turning into a pest. After our 3rd attempt to contact the prospect we are starting to sound desperate for the business…

Here is an alternative approach to begging…simply take away whatever you have offered the prospect since they appear to have lost interest. Something like “Adam, since I haven’t heard from you, my gut feeling is that you are no longer interested in doing business so I am going to go ahead and close your file. This means that our proposal is no longer valid. If this is not what you intended, please contact me immediately.”

One of three things will happen: i) They respond immediately with “Don’t close it” ii) They respond with “Sorry – yes things have changed” but at least you get clarity iii) You get silence – which means you didn’t have a prospect in the first place. Either way, the sale is moving toward closure and you get your dignity back and can stop chasing.

It’s vital that there is no ‘hope’ in the words, or a call to action, or any questions. It is simply a direct but not rude statement that equates to ‘based on the way you are behaving I can only assume that it’s over’.

The standard format could be ‘I have tried to contact you on 3 separate occasions without success.  Based on this, I can only assume that priorities have changed and that it is no longer appropriate for us to keep talking.  It’s not a problem, I appreciate this happens, so I will close the file from our side.’

The tactic is to be completely honest with your prospect.  This approach relies on two essential ingredients to high-performance selling – honesty and guts!  Try it and let me know how you get on...