Positive Prospects Are Trouble

Derrick MoeNo Comments

Prospects have many moves they learn at prospects’ school, but one of the most lethal is the positive move.  The positive move is when the prospect appears to be eager to purchase your solution, especially early in the sales process. Don’t get me wrong, there are always “blue birds” that fly in to a salesperson.  Blue birds are minimal qualifying, quick-closing deals that close so fast that they may not even make it onto the forecast.  They are extremely rare…but salespeople are always entranced by them.  Prospects seem to be aware of these blue birds and will sometimes use a mechanism that mimics a blue bird. The prospect becomes overly… Read More

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Preparation vs. Execution

Derrick MoeNo Comments

SellingPower.com’s article – Help for Your Pre-Call Prep – makes a bold statement in the opening sentence: When you get right down to it, sales are won or lost on preparation. I would argue that sales are won or lost on execution.  Give me a salesperson who executes flawlessly any day over one who prepares flawlessly.  Again, the context is in terms of where deals are lost.  Be that as it may, the article has an interesting statistic found in one of the later graphs. At a time when relatively few initial discussions with a client are progressing further into the sales cycle (40 percent of organizations say only 25… Read More

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