Often, during sales training and motivational seminars, we’re told that “every sale can close.” We’re told that there are no prospects that will not become customers if we just go about it the right way. The fact is, there are sales that will never happen. There are prospects who will never be more than that. The trick is to know when the prospect is not closable and when to move on. Not necessarily the same time, as we’ll see.
If you cannot get the prospect involved in the sales process, if they will not commit to any type of transaction – however simple – then you should set the account down and move on. Some customers just don’t want to say “no” or are using you to gain information that they are using to make deals with their current supplier. Sometimes, it’s nothing more than the prospect enjoys the meetings, feeling of importance, and the perks (freebies) that might be coming with them. Whatever their reason, you aren’t always the one who’s at fault, but you are the one who has control over whether or not it continues.
A fast way to ask something of your prospect to feel out their interest is to ask them to do a task that doesn’t directly pay them anything, but costs them nothing more than time. Such as reviewing a “new product sheet” or other material you want them to review from the customer’s prospective. The short of it is, if they do the work and provide an honest assessment, they’re interested. Otherwise, move on.
Another option is to ask them something that is proprietary, but related to the product. Perhaps ask about their production or sales volumes, the strategic focus of their business now,
But moving on isn’t always the right answer either. Sometimes, it’s best to keep the prospect as a prospect, but put them on the back burner to sort of cool off for a while. Often, this cooling period is the time when the prospect, now no longer “in your sights,” will give them time to reconsider or move forward.
The way to know whether to drop the prospect completely or to keep them in the background is simple: default to keeping them in the background and, if they show renewed interest, bring them forward, but if after a time they have not changed interest levels or seem to have moved on, drop them.
The point is: be ready to walk away. Sometimes – probably more often than most sales trainers and gung-ho managers would admit – a prospect is just not going to be anything more than that.