How to Avoid a 'No-Decision'

Why people *Don’t Buy*

On average a salesperson (across industries and products) will close about 40% of their sales. 

Those are your ‘wins’

This means that you’ve lost 60% of potential sales.  Where does this 60% go? 

If you’re thinking ‘my competitors’, you’re partially right. About 20% of your lost sales are going to your competitors. 

But the other 40% of prospects are lost to ‘no-decision’.  Your prospects decide to stick with the status-quo and make no new changes. 

10% of these people made no decision based on price.

BUT…

The other 30% made  ‘no-decision’ calls based on any other factor besides price. 

Sometimes your biggest competitor is not another company, but the status quo. You’re working against prospects not taking action based on your presentation/ demos/ calls. 

Why is this happening though?

The biggest reason: your presentation did not have enough value. 

For them to change anything there have to be 3 things they clearly understand:

1. What are they going to gain? How much money are they going to make off this? How much money will they save?
2. By how much? Quantify an exact number or % for them. (ex. Product X will save your 2% every month on manufacturing costs).
3. Perceived effort. How much effort will they have to put forth to get that gain (item #1)? If the customer perceives the effort to implement your product or service to be greater than the gain, they won’t buy. 

This is why selling the features or benefits doesn’t work – because, in the client’s mind, all they see is the amount of effort they’ll have to put forth to make that gain happen. 

To combat this, we need to find a way to walk the client through our solution and what is required of. them to ease their perceived effort.

You can:

• Offer them a 30-60-90 day roadmap plan that outlines all implementation steps. 

• Set realistic expectations about how many man-hours will be required for set up/ training/ implementation in the first few weeks. (For example, you could say: “Mr. Customer, I will need 2 hours to train your team on the new software on the first week and 1 hour on the second week. After that, they should be good to go”)

• When they will start seeing results ( Mr. Customer, after the initial 2 week set up, you’ll start seeing the upsides). 

Often, I get the question “Victor, I had a great presentation, I presented the value, I walked them through my product and everyone seemed engaged. At the end, I still got the response ‘Let me think about it’. What happened?”

This is usually because the prospect does see the value, but the perceived effort of trying a new product outweighs any upsides or quantified value you presented.  

Once you’re able to assuage the clients’ mental pain of switching products, you will have removed a huge hurdle to the close.