(Some Aren’t What You Think.)
October 13, 2021
By Rachel Smith
Last week we warned you about zombies, and this week we have something else to caution you against. Bad omens, inauspicious signs, harbingers of doom—they are out there, but we often overlook them until it’s too late and our deal is dead. I’m not talking about Friday the 13th or broken mirrors—we’re science based here at Maestro. Besides, spiders don’t scare me. (How can you tell me something that’s fuzzy and has eight eyeballs of all different sizes isn’t adorable??)
The reason zombie deals end up in our pipelines in the first place is that we don’t recognize the telltale signs that these sales are dying. Some of this is wishful thinking, but some of it also happens because some bad omens don’t seem so bad on the surface. Read on to find out what to look for in order to save your deal before it becomes a brain-eating monster. And we’re sharing some amazing research from Gong.io to back it all up.
It’s hard not to see this as a good sign. Who doesn’t want an enthusiastic prospect? But think about it. If you’re making a big purchase, let’s say a new washing machine, what do you do when you’re interested? You ask questions about potential issues. You look it up on Consumer Reports and compare it with other models. You might even contact an appliance repair shop and ask if they have to fix this brand often. To the guy at Lowe’s trying to sell you the washer, none of these things are typically perceived as good. They are seen as objections, or at least resistance. And you only exhibit resistance when you’re serious about buying.
How do you react when you know you’re not buying what he’s selling? The same way my husband and I reacted to the refrigerators that connect to your phone. “That is so cool! Look at everything you can do!” We didn’t ask any questions because: (a) Why would I pay extra money to have a phone on my refrigerator when I have a phone on my phone? (b) the fanciest thing on the appliance is the hardest to fix and always breaks first, and (c) that’s just what I need, to have a text from my sister read aloud about how my parents are driving us nuts while our parents are standing right there (you know it would happen). We didn’t asked questions because we didn’t care. We didn’t care because we were never going to buy it.
The lesson here is that getting absolutely no resistance from your prospect should be a red flag. Gong assessed more than 20,000 B2B sales calls, measuring what they called “sentiment.” Essentially, they ranked each word, sentence, and overall conversation on a five-point scale from very negative to very positive. They found that lost deals have a 12.8% higher sentiment score. In fact, “positive sentiment levels gradually but consistently decline as a deal progresses through each opportunity stage.” Basically, your prospect should be getting grouchier as you go.
If you are starting out with an overly-enthusiastic prospect, it’s your job to dig in and find out more about their true concerns. We always say a fast no is better than a slow maybe. More importantly, as you guide your prospect closer to a deal, expect them to get more and more negative, and see it as your role to address any concerns head on and help them across the finish line.
Discussing price will be part of any deal negotiation, but if your prospect continually returns to the issue of price, you and your prospect are likely not a good fit. If someone continues to ask you for price breaks, they likely don’t understand the value of your product.
It’s best to bring up price on the first call. Win rates are ten percent higher when price is discussed on the first call versus the second. So, bring up pricing early, but take note if the prospect brings it up often. If they do, you might need to have a frank discussion about what their budget truly is and whether your product is a good fit for their needs.
The “D” in Maestro’s information-gathering framework, DRIVE, stands for “decision.” You need to know who is making the final purchasing decision as well as how that decision gets made. But just knowing is not enough. You have to actually meet with the stakeholders, and if you can’t, that indicates a problem.
The importance of communicating directly with the decision maker cannot be overstated. Small and mid-sized business deals are 80 percent less likely to close if the decision maker is not involved according to research conducted by Gong.io. For enterprise deals, an absent decision maker means the deal is 233 percent less likely to close. If you’re being shut out of meeting with anyone but your first point of contact, your deal is in trouble. On average, winning deals have at least three people from the buyer side involved in meetings across the sales cycle.
Do you know what’s the best predictor of whether your deal will close? Email velocity. You know how important it is to keep a deal moving, and email velocity provides the clearest assessment of how quickly your deal is going. And unfortunately, it’s not just how often you email your prospect (which you can control), but rather the frequency with which they are sending you messages.
There is a 531-percent gap between the total number of emails that the prospect sends per week for closed lost deals versus closed won. That gap grows even larger during the final week of a deal. This is why tactics such as gifting and frequent touchpoints are so critical—they increase the velocity of communication.
Your prospect’s body language can give you a lot of clues as to how they are feeling, if you know what to look for. Are they making eye contact with you? Great. Are they leaning out or leaning in? Leaning in signals interest in the conversation. Are their arms crossed? This signals defensiveness. What about fidgeting? That’s a sign that they aren’t truly engaged. Learning to look for these subtle cues can help you gauge your prospect’s interest and better predict the outcome.
You can’t get any body-language information from your prospect, however, if you’re not using your webcam. Turn. Your. Video. On! We all think that we communicate just as well via email or over the phone, but our brains pick up so many clues from how people look and the non-verbal cues they give us.
Always turn on your video when you are speaking to a prospect, and encourage them to do the same. Gong found that win rates were 94 percent higher when the seller had their webcam on. The results were similar when looking at whether the buyer turned on their camera—a 96-percent increase in win rates.
Wait, what? The science doesn’t lie, folks. F-bombs for everyone! Okay, before things get too out of hand, let’s go straight to the research on this. Gong’s analysis does suggest that if both parties curse during a sales call, it actually increases win rates by eight percent.
IF your prospect curses first, and IF you feel comfortable doing it, and IF it’s how you really speak, then f–ing go for it.
It’s all too easy to get happy ears and hear what you want to hear in a call. Precisely for this reason, it’s important to take a step back and look critically at the signs in front of you—especially since good things (no resistance) can be bad, and bad things (cursing) can be good. Keeping an eye out for bad omens can keep you from letting zombies into your pipeline to begin with. Now, where did that f–ing spider go?
Want to keep more deals alive and healthy? Reach out to our zombie slayers at mastery@maestrogroup.co.
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