What Are You Waiting For?

What a great presentation! The room was full of people listening intently to your message. The body language was great with everyone’s head was nodding. Your confidence was high as you headed back to the office with a list of ten open questions. Most were easy, but a two would require input from product management and could require commitment from your executive team to deliver on. You get to work and document all of the straightforward responses and reach out to your peers on the others. You want to provide a complete response to the open questions. Then you wait – and wait – and wait for feedback on the two remaining issues. Hours turn to days and days turn to weeks.

Your customer wonders what happened to you, and the deal is lost to your competition.

Turns out that your competitor took a different approach. They were clearly in second place, and they had twice as many open questions. But rather than wait until they had the responses for all twenty questions, the sales representative followed up the very next day on twelve of them. Two days later, three more responses were delivered. By the end of the week, there was only one remaining question and it was a tough one. Over the next two weeks, the sales representative engaged in on-going discussions to clarify open questions related to the final question from the internal team, and used that time to continue to sell against your clear advantages. A final, comprehensive response was delivered, and the customer still hadn’t heard from you.