The big divide

Everyone is working towards a fourth quarter number which closes out the year. It’s always a scramble, and this year’s sales and marketing effort was likely more painful than others. Serious delays in responses, and getting ghosted entirely. Prospects are hesitant to pull the trigger, committing to a spend they might regret based on the wild business environment and economy we’re living in.

One thing is for certain: making a decision to not decide is still a decision, leaving the prospect company in the same state. Not moving forward. Your product or service solves a problem. If they are price shoppers, you already know what’s going to happen. But not everyone is. And when you think about your messages — the same ones you’ve been sending for a while now — they might not be working hard enough anymore.

Right now, Zoom meetings and conference rooms are full of number discussions. The numbers we promised the board, the advisors, the investors, and the growth percentage they drive with an EBITDA expectation behind it. There’s a BIG DIVIDE between those key numbers and the activities that are supposedly going to get you there. It could be as wide as the Grand Canyon, and you may not know that.

How do you close that gap in the time you have left? Not with shiny new prospects — those won’t likely close this year. There are usually prospects that can be reconstituted, because the relationship made it to a certain point before it stalled. That is a much better place to start than from scratch with a firm that doesn’t know you yet.

They are sitting somewhere in your spreadsheets, or even better, your CRM.

Start with what’s closest to close

You may be applying a lead scoring approach to your prospects, assigning a number 1 to 10 based on how HOT a prospect is. A “10” indicates they are ideal:

• High revenue potential.
• High margin, which may be driven by the products or services in consideration.
• Growth factors, if applicable.
• Fit factors — they trust the expertise and see the value your firm offers, they are pleasant to deal with, and you are working with the decision makers or key influencers.

If you haven’t lead scored your prospects, go through your pipeline and assign values by area. Now you have your priorities in order.

Then take the highly rated ones, the 8s to 10s across all categories, and ask whether you actually know their qualitative situation:

• What their buying criteria are.
• How serious they are about making a decision.
• Whether they understand your unique value. And whether you do.

What was the last communication, and is there an opportunity to reinforce differentiation? Is your team clear on what makes your solutions better than the others? Has that been communicated yet, in conversation and in email? Are you using the same words your competitors have on their website? Chances are you are. I see this all the time as I do a deep dive on competitive positioning.

Why they really went quiet

Your pipeline stages tell you what you did. They don’t tell you what is happening on their side. Here is what I see:

• They are afraid to make a decision, even when they are the decision maker.
• They don’t trust their gut, because they made a bad decision before — or many of them. They are not educated buyers. Most decision makers have never bought what you sell more than once or twice, so they don’t know what the real buying criteria should be.
• They have to run it by someone. A CFO, a board, an investor, who is prone to say “well, maybe we need to think about this.”
• They are smart, so they have to come up with a reason to lean on a no rather than just agree it’s the right thing to do.
• Lack of urgency. Until the pain comes back in a few weeks and reminds them why they have a problem in the first place, they are distracted putting out other fires.
• They don’t know how to sell it internally, which goes back to the first point.

How does this make a difference? None of those are reasons to chase harder. They are all reasons to give the prospect something they don’t currently have.

Show them how to make their decision

Here is where this gets practical. Work it on an account-based level, meaning one opportunity at a time, starting with the top lead scorers.

Get inside their head and see this from their perspective. They have to convince someone in the organization that you are the right answer. Give them the words to sell it internally. Use this framework:

• Here’s the situation.
• What’s lying underneath that makes the situation more challenging than it may appear.
• This is what it costs us to solve it with this company.
• Why are they the answer.
• Here’s why they are worth it.
• Here’s what we risk if we don’t go with them.

Notice the pronouns. This is written the way your champion would say it inside their own building, not the way you would say it to them.

You can go further than that. Build the RFP for them, so they understand what they should be asking each provider about, and pre-fill your firm’s answers — because they won’t necessarily hear and take away the right stuff from a conversation. We have to show them how to make the best decision possible, even if we aren’t the right answer.

What is the risk? You get some of the details wrong. You assume what you don’t know, but it might be closer than you realize. It’s the framework and the perspective that matter more than the details.

Leverage your CRM

It’s easy to think we’ll remember the core details of a pre-sales or discovery call. Recordings of meetings capture the golden nuggets we might not remember. And if we’re not capturing key information in our CRM, then it’s more difficult to unlock the prospect that is really hiding revenue inside.

The secret is to capture the right fields of information to categorize the situation. Some CRMs charge a fortune to customize fields, and that’s a problem. You need the flexibility to adjust data fields, easily add additional drop-down options, and create the views and reports that can facilitate reconstituting your prospects.

Start with lead scoring, and then capture simple prospect tracking fields for easy reference. What is the next step? What are the key dates for the first connection, the formal discovery call, the follow up meeting?

Then add the fields that match the list above. Who else has to say yes. What they would have to defend internally. What they compared you against. Those are the fields that tell you what a stalled prospect actually needs.

Before the quarter closes

Lead scoring is not just a year-end push. It is a driver for the KPIs that tell the CEO and the leadership team what marketing has created for the sales team, and where each of those opportunities actually sits.

Focus on the closest to close, and have the team work their way down, pushing the lower scored leads through the sales and marketing funnel.

On Monday, these are the questions to put to the team:

• Are we lead scoring? And if so, what percent of our prospects are in the top tier?
• What do we have to do to put them over the edge to a yes?
• What are we not considering that they are struggling with internally, and what do they need from us to sell us internally?

What is the right tool — a one pager — that gives them the meat?