Why Proposals Don’t Close the Sale

Rob  00:07

When’s the right time to present a proposal, or what about a full-blown presentation? When do you walk your prospect through your ideas, your process and your pricing? If you’re asking that question, you’re not alone, and that’s probably why you’re here.

Rob  00:21

A lot of salespeople think if I just show them something that’s kind of impressive and really cool, they’ll say yes, razzle dazzle…that’s what I do. And then all of a sudden, they say yes.

Rob  00:30

But guess what? If you haven’t uncovered the real pain or real sense of urgency or understanding what their budget is and a whole process of how they make decisions, your proposals gonna fall on deaf ears, or, better yet, you’re going to fall on deaf ears because you’re not going to hear back from them.

Rob  00:46

In this episode, we’re going to walk you through exactly when you should present what needs to happen first. A few red flags of, hey, maybe you shouldn’t be doing this quite yet. And we’re also going to talk about a compare and contrast kind of a story here that I had with a client that I was helping get the sale. And we closed this deal, pretty big deal in a couple of days, and it just took that for a variety of reasons, but it only took that for the size project. This was actually a pretty good deal. Let’s get started.

V/O  01:09

This is The Slow Pitch Podcast,

Rob  01:13

So let’s talk a little bit about what when you should be giving a presentation or doing a proposal. And my answer to that, and you may have heard me say once before, and that is, you really almost never should be doing that, you should almost be doing that as an afterthought.

Rob  01:26

It should be coming way at the end of a long process. And by long process, I mean relatively speaking. So, if your sales cycle is a one day, one and done kind of conversation, you should have maybe an hour-long conversation and then a five minute here’s the presentation. That, that’s really it.

Rob  01:42

So relate that to if this is a six-month process, then your final presentation should be about 15 to 20 minutes of presenting information, and I say presenting in a loose way, I’ll share with you here in a minute what I mean by that. Let’s dig into a little bit of an example.

Rob  01:57

So I have a client that was working with who wants to have a big project that came in and she was thinking, hey, this is a good project. I want this project. And we had to kind of right set some mindsets there, because in the beginning, if you want something really, really bad, it can come across the wrong way.

Rob  02:12

So let’s take that idea out of your head, and let’s first start with the idea of you don’t have the job yet, you may not get the job. And guess what? You probably may never get the job, and if you don’t, you’re going to be okay. Alright, so let’s start from that.

Rob  02:25

It’s, it’s a matter of you have the right mindset walking in. That’s the first key. The job was this. She had a lead that came in. It was a private school. They needed to switch their vendor. Her company does HVAC, or heating, air conditioning, those types of things.

Rob  02:38

So she was in South Florida, and so air conditioning is pretty important. You don’t want to live there without an air conditioner. Most of the time, throughout the year.

Rob  02:45

This private school called her and said, “Hey, we have a need to switch our vendor. We’re having some problems, and we would like to switch the vendor out.” And so, to me, that was the first little red flag you want to switch the vendor out, huh? How come?

Rob  02:57

So before we had the meeting with this private school, and I say we, meaning I’m kind of helping her, so I’m behind the scenes, “We,” but really what happens is we had to go through a series of questions, of, you know, why are they, why are they searching for this? What is the issue that’s going on, and why are they working on trying to find a vendor?

Rob  03:13

Well, come to find out, she was handed another company’s proposal when she met with them, and I thought that was even more telling that this poor guy who went there, it sounds like, went to look at this system that they were running into problems with, and went through a whole bunch of stuff and just wrote it all out, gave a price and said, “Here you go.”

Rob  03:31

And also in this particular estimate, which was nice for him to share, this is they said something in there that that was like, hey, we’re, by the way, we’re the best we’ve worked for this many years. We’ve done all these things, blah, blah, blah, and it’s really nice that they do all that, but you know, that means nothing if you don’t earn their trust ahead of time. Right?

Rob  03:47

When my client Amanda, we decided we’re going to go into this thing, and we’ve been handed this, there’s a little bit of a different approach here, right? So, and this should be the same approach, but now we have some inside information that we didn’t really wouldn’t have access to it normally.

Rob  04:00

So then she says, well, when did you start to figure out that you need a new unit? And they start answering those questions. And then she says, well, what happens if you just don’t fix it right now?

Rob  04:00

The issue really was that this school has a air conditioning unit. Compressor is kind of old and about to die. It’s a 12-ton unit. Doesn’t mean anything other than it’s old and it needs to get replaced pretty soon, because if they don’t replace it before the beginning of the new school year, it may become an issue.

Rob  04:16

Layer on to that they also have. we find out later that, their budget resets soon over the summer, and so you want to, kind of, they want to spend that money now rather than later. That’s the way that they wanted to do it.

Rob  04:30

So, this other company had put in a warranty, maintenance plans, all this other stuff. That’s nice, but we felt like, you know what? What if we don’t need all that stuff?

Rob  04:35

So, Amanda, when she went, she took a little look around, and she shows up. They walk her through. They show her the unit. She looks around, does some investigating, and says, hmm, so tell, tell me again. Why do you think you need a new unit? And that was a little bit jarring to them that she said they, she said they, they were like, what do you mean? Why we think this is what we were told?

Rob  04:53

And she says, Well, okay, but why? What’s what seems to be the problem still working, isn’t it? And they said, Well, okay, you, you. Yes, but it doesn’t work all the time. It doesn’t get as cold as it used to. It just it’s, it’s, it takes forever for things to cool down.

Rob  05:14

I mean, you’ve got a new school year, you got a new budget. Why wouldn’t you just do that then? And so she goes through all these questions and finds out whether, you know, students are complaining already this time of year.

Rob  05:26

Schools are not out yet, and you know there’s an event coming up, parents are going to be there. They don’t want a chance that this thing’s going to be down. And so, she’s like, have you have you had any events since it went down or started going down at all? Have you had any events since then?

Rob  05:36

And they said, no, we haven’t had any, but we’re afraid that’s going to go down before this event comes up. And she’s like, okay, like, okay? And she’s like, well, you have a vendor already, don’t you? Why wouldn’t you just call them? Why are you calling me?

Rob  05:47

They said, Yeah, but there’s a reason this thing is going down. They haven’t really fixed it. They haven’t maintained it. They said they would maintain it. They haven’t come out as often as they used to, or they should, and we’re not happy about it.

Rob  05:55

She’s like, Oh, that’s not good. Well, have you called them to at least come out? And check out. Maybe they just didn’t even know that this was bad. Maybe was bad. Maybe you should call them.

Rob  06:11

They’re like, no, we don’t want to work with them anymore. And they gave her a bunch of reasons why they didn’t want to. One was, is that they took forever to get there? And so that was an interesting thing, too.

Rob  06:12

If that took forever for that company to get over there, why did that take so long? Is it because they’re busy? Is it because they were a difficult client? They just want to deal with them. So, she starts digging into some of those questions.

Rob  06:22

The point is, she started asking a whole bunch of questions about that vendor, but it was just a conversation. It was very comfortable. They were answering the questions freely, because they didn’t feel like they were being sold.

Rob  06:35

They didn’t feel like they needed to protect themselves. But she was gaining so much information. And then she turns to them and says, you know what? These units, they’re not they’re not inexpensive.

Rob  06:44

Have you guys set aside funds for stuff like this happening? Because this can happen occasionally, I’m sure. And they said, Yeah, we do. We have a budget. This is kind of part of the deal. We knew that some of the maintenance stuff needs to happen, and this could be one of those items.

Rob  07:08

She said, hmm, and what did you guys set aside for something like this? This this is kind of a big deal. They said, Yeah, it is, but we’ve said we’ve set us out. And then she they told her how much she’s they set aside and she was happy to hear that number, because it fit with what it would take to get that done.

Rob  07:10

And then she said, what if I told you that might be a little bit more than that? What would happen then? Now that was an interesting question, right? They told her the budget. She felt like that’s an okay budget to be able to repair it.

Rob  07:21

But if she says, well, what if I told you, it might be a little bit more than that, what was their answer? Their answer was, it would be okay, because we have funds that we can move around from this area to this area, we’re going to be okay with that.

Rob  07:31

So she knew that that number that they said originally is pretty good, that’s probably going to be okay. That’s something that’s really interesting and helpful to know, isn’t it that they could pull money from another account if they needed to. So, she says, alright, well, should we start to talk some budget, would that make sense?

Rob  07:47

And so they said, Yeah, let’s do that. So, she starts kind of digging through and figuring out what that would look like. And then she says, somewhere in the conversation, would it make sense for us to put a few options together for you and figure out what’s the right option for you guys?

Rob  07:58

Knowing she thought she could probably give them a couple of options to choose from, which could involve other things along the way over the years that come, but it would be helpful for them as options.

Rob  08:07

So, she talked about the different options, and kind of let them select which ones they thought they would like to see pricing on, all knowing that that was all within their budget that they talked about. So, let’s talk about what this difference is between the original guy that came out that just handed off his estimate and walked away, versus her.

Rob  08:26

They told her this private school person, that maintenance person, that facilities manager, they told her, you asked so many questions. You helped us understand that you knew what we were going through, what we needed to fix, and understood what the problem was, understood what the possible solutions were and started to put together a solution for us. That’s what they told her.

Rob  08:44

And so, what really comes down to is the original guy that came out didn’t know if there was any pain or not. He just said, this is what you need. I see it, but they didn’t know for sure, and they weren’t… They weren’t comfortable with somebody that just didn’t dig into it far enough.

Rob  08:56

He didn’t confirm a budget, necessarily. It was tough to tell, because he was kind of close to the budget, but he wasn’t exactly where he should be. And whenever somebody just says, hey, just send it over, it’s a lot of times a brush off.

Rob  09:08

So, they didn’t say that to her. She asked, do you want me to go through this with you before I send this to you? That that’s her process. She doesn’t just send it over. She sets up a meeting, she reviews it with them and lets them make a decision.

Rob  09:20

And I think the key to this is that when they tell you what’s at stake, and they if they don’t solve the problem, that’s a huge answer. When you know the budget and the timeline and the range and all that stuff fits, you know, that’s a good positive for you. It’s a strike in the corner for you, right?

Rob  09:33

And you know, when you ask them, would you like me to put something together, and they say yes, with some context of why that’s helpful, and when you’ve confirmed there’s a decision making path, you know what’s happening next based on their what they’re doing and what you’re doing, that’s a huge deal too.

Rob  09:47

I mean, you have to remember proposals and presentations. They’ll never close a deal. The conversations will close the deal. It’s always about the conversations that you have before you build or do anything.

Rob  09:58

Ask yourself, what is the information that I do not know, because once you’ve got pain, you got the budget, you got some decisions, only then is it right to start to make some solutions.

Rob  10:07

So, if you or your team is sending out proposals and not getting any response, it might be time to fix it, or maybe not. Maybe it’s not costing you anything to do that, you know, maybe, maybe that’s not an issue for you.

Rob  10:17

Regardless, you can contact us at questions at the slowpitch.com if you have any questions about how to fix your sales issues, especially if you might be presenting an estimate too soon or the wrong way, remember, Slow Down and Close More and thanks for listening.

V/O  10:34

Thank you for listening to The Slow Pitch. Do you have a question about sales? Call or text your question at (608) 708-SLOW. That’s (608) 708-7569. Or you can email them at Questions@TheSlowPitch.com. Slow Down and Close More.