February is the perfect time to review your sales pipeline for stalled deals, those opportunities that have stagnated. Deals get stalled for many reasons and here are a few examples
An Unresponsive Customer: Customers stop returning calls or email
The Customer Decision Process Languishes: A customer commits to an important step to advance the deal that never occurs. For example, they say the committee will discuss your product, but the committee meeting is continually delayed for one reason or another.
Competing Priorities Emerge: Purchases get postponed due to other priorities. For example, the budget for your project gets reallocated to something else. The customer says they are still interested so you push the close date. The deal never gets reprioritize and the close date gets delayed perpetually.
When a deal gets stalled, you need to a fresh approach to find out what is really happening behind the scenes. You must re-quality the opportunity. Extricating a stalled deal often requires a technique the CEB Challenger Sale sales methodology refers to as “Taking Control of the Sale.” Taking Control of the Sale means challenging the status quo to dislodge your deal. To shake these deals loose, fact finding is required including sometimes uncomfortable conversations and direct questioning with the goal of learning why your deal is stalled so you can reinvigorate it.
Here are some examples of Challengers Taking Control of the Sale to rescue stalled opportunities:
Find new buying influences: Erica sells web conferencing systems. Her key contact, Lou, is unresponsive to her regular outreach for two months. She decides it is time to find others in the organization who may need web conferencing. Lou is in IT and had said he had a budget and would be buying but he has gone silent. Erica researches names and contact information of managers in other departments like Corporate Learning and HR that would be users of the web conferencing tools. She calls the people in the other departments to start the process of re-qualifying to assess if she has a real opportunity. Erica finds that some of her competition has been speaking with these departments. Her timing is good to be able to compete. She re-qualifies the budget, timeframe, and Lou’s position in the buying process and she updates her sales pipeline to reflect the new details. Her opportunity is moving forward toward a sale again.
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Both Erica and Ryan make bold moves to shake their stalled deals loose. They potentially risk their key client relationship by broadening their reach in a way that might offend their main client contacts. They know it is worth it. A stalled opportunity is not one they can count on and more information is needed to judge if it is real. Erica and Ryan are Challengers as revealed in the way the Take Control of the Sale to free stalled opportunities.
What about those sales reps who are not natural Challengers? In Part 2, techniques for reframing sales as project management illustrate steps all types of salespeople can use for accelerating sales opportunities.
