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The Winner, Losers and "Buzz Kill"
March 14, 2007
By Steve W. Martin
Every deal has a critical moment or turning point that determines the winner and the losers. In some cases, the turning point is easy to spot. For example, a salesperson may be presenting his solution and encounters a deal-breaking objection that he is unable to overcome. Even though the customer remains cordial for the rest of the meeting, a turning point has occurred and the deal is lost.
In most cases, the turning point occurs when the salesperson isn't present. It's in casual hallway conversations or internal e-mails that selection team members share opinions that influence vendor's futures. The only outward sign that a turning point has occurred is the perceptible change in deal momentum.
Every salesperson competing for the same piece of business is trying to gain momentum. Momentum includes positive buying signs and other forms of customer favortism. While the winning salesperson is enjoying preferential treatment, the losers are unaware that they have experienced "buzz kill," the moment during the sales cycle where the customer has eliminated them from contention. Unfortunately, losers will continue to waste time and effort on the deal with the mistaken hope they can reseruct momentum. However, even though the customer may not make a public announcement about the winner for weeks or even months, the deal is lost.
You probably are wondering about the term "buzz kill." Buzz kill represents the person, business reason, political issue or technical obstacle that causes momentum to turn downward. Ninety-nine out of 100 times you will not recover from buzz kill. However, some companies won't let salespeople stop working deals. You may even be familiar with the following drill that I call the "walk of shame." All the various sales managers meet with the rep and theorize about all the possible ways to win. Then they mandate that the selling continue even though the salesperson knows working on a deal past buzz kill is a waste of time.
Sometimes salespeople will decide on their own to continue the walk of shame. Since they have invested so much time, energy, and emotion into the deal they find it impossible to let it go. This is particularly true for salespeople who have neglected to build up a pipeline future business opportunities.
Time takes on an additional dimension of meaning during the sales cycle. During the sales process, time is not just minutes and days, it is actually a measure of deal momentum. Therefore, forward momentum in a deal represents good or positive time and backward momentum is bad or negative time. "Heavy hitters" (truly great salespeople) keep the negative time they spend on deals to a minimum.
Just as seasoned gamblers know which cards to discard and which to keep, heavy hitters know when to pursue and when to drop deals. They know their biggest competitor is time. Time is the enemy because time is finite. There are 90 days in a quarter. Heavy hitters know that they can work only a finite number of deals during this time so they must invest time wisely in qualified accounts. Unfortunately, a qualified account can be disqualified at any time during the sales cycle. It takes a lot of discipline to walk away from an account where there has been a heavy investment of time, energy and emotions.
Heavy hitters seek to understand what a customer is trying to accomplish from a business and technical perspective. Ideally, they want to actually change the customer's technical requirements to suit their product or, at a minimum, prove to the customer that the product meets a checklist of requirements. The process of qualifying a deal from a technical and business perspective is what most people outside the sales field associate with the term "qualification." When someone from engineering, accounting, or marketing asks if a deal is "qualified," they are referring to these formal processes.
The heavy hitter's intuitive qualification process is far more important than the formal qualification process. The goal of the intuitive process is the successful search for the truth, and this is not a sequential process like marking items off a checklist. In fact, two competing salespeople could ask the same question and receive identical answers. However, the salesperson with the ability to identify lies and interpret incongruencies, whether in the language the customer uses or non-verbal contradictions from the body, is in a much better position to find the truth and win the deal. This is because customers say things they don't mean and mean things they don't say.
Steve W. Martin is the author of Heavy Hitter Sales Wisdom: Proven Sales Warfare Strategies, Secrets of Persuasion and Common-Sense Tips for Success. Visit www.heavyhitterwisdom.com for additional articles and information.
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