Fail Faster to Win More Sales
When you start out in sales, you often hear that 70 percent of all deals you’re working on should be winnable. This myth caused me to waste a lot of time on deals that were never winnable.
I soon learned that rather than chase deals that may never pan out, it’s better to mark deals lost earlier on in the sales process. This way you can be more efficient with your time by focusing on deals that are winnable and spend less time on ones that aren’t. Once I figured this out, I turned this myth on its ear and spent 70 percent of my time on deals that were genuinely winnable to keep my sales pipeline clean and move deals quickly through the sales lifecycle.
To fail fast in sales, here are five tips to keep in mind:
- Trust your gut early on if you feel that a deal is unwinnable. By making the call early on, you’ll be able to shift most of the lost deals from the end of the sales cycle towards the beginning. This is important because each one of us has only a certain amount of energy or brain processing power each day. And even if you’re not spending a lot of time on these unwinnable deals, there’s still a part of your brain that’s wasting energy on the possibility that they could pan out.
- Speed is key to winning deals. A proven factor in winning more deals is sales velocity or the speed at which you’re able to move a deal through the sales funnel from first contact to a successful close. Having a bunch of close-to-dead deals in your pipeline that you occasionally follow up on takes away from your focus and ultimately drags down your sales velocity. If you remove them from your pipeline, you can focus all of your energy at quickly closing the deals that are in your 70 percent winnable category.
- Be straightforward in assessing an unwinnable prospect. Don’t be afraid to proactively ask straightforward questions such as “Based on your need and the solution we talked about, do you think you’ll be interested in buying in the next week or month?” You should of course modify this slightly based on where your prospect is in the lifecycle. If the answer is “We’re not yet sure” or “We’ll know more in a few weeks,” ask questions to better understand what’s stopping them for making the purchase—and then politely end the sales conversation. By losing the deal proactively, you can move it out of your pipeline and focus on the ones that are winnable.
- Study each lost deal with the rigor of a scientist. Create a codified, standardized list of reasons why a prospect is uninterested and use it to document each lost deal. Each week review all your open deals and the lost deals from the prior week. Develop a deep understanding of your losing and winning categories and use this information to adjust your sales tactics each week.
- Gain an understanding of your perfect customer profile. If you pay close attention, you’ll start to see a pattern emerge among your top customers. This will often show up in terms of overall strategic fit, such as how the product fits their needs, where they are in their purchase cycles, as well as their budget requirements. Once you see the pattern, start to figure out how to get more prospects who fit this profile into your sales pipeline and proactively lose deals with prospects that don’t fit this profile.
If you learn to follow these tips on how to lose deals faster, you’ll be able to focus on the deals that matter most and stop wasting time and energy on the ones that don’t.
Now pick up the phone and start selling. Time is of the essence.
