January 7, 2008
The Two-Minute Warning
It’s playoff time for the NFL and I love to watch quarterbacks (and coaches) who can execute in the red zone, run an effective two-minute drill and get the job done. That may be why I get so nervous when I hear salespeople say – ” It’s in the client’s hands now, all we can do is wait.”
We’re waiting on such an opportunity right now, and we’ve been waiting since before Christmas 2007. I’m nervous because there is no two-minute drill in progress to help the customer make the right decision and there appears to be a lack of urgency in our salesperson’s approach, now that the proposal is in the client’s hands.
In a former life, we took a different approach, and always held a post-presentation strategy session. Yes, post, or AFTER, we had pitched our best solutions to the customer. That’s when the real sales work began.
We analyzed the reaction to our pitch, called our client coaches and advisors to catch the buzz, and scheduled a specific follow-up meeting with our key contact to get specific feedback. We asked ourselves (and our contacts) the really hard questions:
What has changed in the buying situation?
Did our value proposition resonate? How do we stack up against the competition’s pitch?
And the big Q – What can we do (right now) to ensure that we are selected?
Then we crafted a specific action plan with tasks, responsibilities and due dates. We treated closing the deal with as much focus and energy as we did in gaining the opportunity, creating the solution or making the pitch.
The time period after an RFP is received, after the dog-and-pony show and after all that hard estimating and proposal work is critical. Marching 99 yards in seven plays to get to the one yard line with 30 seconds left in the half is great, but it means nothing if the team can’t punch it in for the score. Lot’s of things can happen after the proposal is given to the client – the decision committee may change criteria based on what they’ve seen and learned, a re-design effort might be started if none of the designs (or costs) meet the client company’s criteria, the guy you’ve thought all along is the lynch pin for the decision (and your advocate) may lose the power to get the decision made, much less made in your favor.
What if your price is only 2% higher than the next guy’s and you’ve still got margin room with which to work? How bad are you going to feel when you fumble that snap?
If Sales is passive during this time, and the opportunity is lost, expect to hear excuses that try to pin the reason on external forces – the competition, the client, the product, the economy…anything the AE isn’t responsible for.
If the approach is active, strategic and self-directed, and the opportunity is awarded to someone else, expect to hear the AE make a more personal responsibility statement – “I should have developed more coaches. I should have dug deeper into economic needs. I probably didn’t fully understand their pain.”
Don’t assume. Hope is not a strategy. The job’s not done until the deal is signed. The plane of the goal line must be crossed. Close the deal.
In selecting sales professionals for your organization, how can you tell if candidates have this ability? Objective assessment tools help, mining and qualifying the resume might shed some light, and checking with references could help. But direct questioning during the face-to-face interview will reveal, at a minimum, the candidate’s orientation to this key sales situation.
You might ask the candidate – “Tell me about one of your biggest losses. After you gave the pitch, what happened?”
If they just sat and waited, perhaps you should wait, too. If they manufactured a successful two-minute drill, but still lost the business due to factors beyond their control, you’ll at least know that the candidate has the mojo to try strategies based on action, not just hope.
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