Sales is about inspiring urgency. Whether you’re selling new cars or selling HR software to a Benefits manager, the goal of sales is the same: inspire them to buy your product quickly. One of the best ways to succeed in your role is to search for the “no.” Once you understand where the “no” is and what it means, your job of forecasting revenue becomes much easier.
Of course It’s only natural to be uncomfortable with the word ‘no’ because since we were children we associated “no” with bad behavior. This natural condition is one of the reasons in sales there is no shortcut for pure experience. You need to condition yourself, and in this case, recondition yourself to hear the “no” in order to understand what it means and then keep the conversation moving. Only by sheer volume of sales calls and closed/won deals does someone instill this proper technique into their repertoire.
The reason a well-trained sales rep wants to hear the word “no” is because it provides a barometer of where the deal is. For example, if during the discovery call the salesperson asks the Benefits manager if they have budget for the purchase this quarter, they want to hear “yes or no.” Accepting anything in between is likely to yield story-time where the sales rep receives neither of the two and therefore does not have sufficient knowledge to generate an accurate forecast.
Contrarily, if the sales rep hears the word “no” to their budget question, they can then decide where to take the conversation. You might want to back it up a little bit with something like: “Ok, I understand you don’t have budget set-aside this quarter, have you ever spent money with a new vendor this quarter?” By showing them you’ve heard their “no” and stepped back, the sales rep will gain more insight into who their prospect is, and the probability that they will purchase.
Besides giving you more insight around forecasting, searching for the “no” can also provide surprising results. Most of the products that I’ve sold have followed a product demonstration. However, by searching for the “no,” I’ve closed a handful of deals without ever having demonstrated the product.
In one example, I had a discovery call and toward the end of the meeting the prospect asked for more information on our product. I sent over the information requested (white papers, case studies) and we scheduled a follow-up call the next day. When we got on that second call, it was immediately clear that the prospect had read all the material I had sent because he was quoting from one of the case studies. I then asked a couple of questions before inquiring “what was left?” and he responded: “I just need to sign the contract.” It wasn't quite like the scene in Moneyball, but the conversation ended quickly after that comment and I sent the contract a few minutes later.
In this situation, I had heard the “no” on the first meeting, when the prospect wanted to learn more about our solution. Then on the second meeting, it was quickly apparent that the prospect was really engaged, so I pushed on the gas and asked some larger questions which led to the big one: “what’s left before you become a customer?” and he responded: “I just need to sign the contract.” If I had been focused on checking all the boxes in my CRM, I would have missed the larger fact that this customer had already decided to buy my product. The selling was done, it was time to shepherd this prospect over to Customer Success and move him into the world of happy customer.
Searching for the “no” will help inspire urgency with your prospects. Because your focus should always be about the customer. Learning to hear their answers and accepting their “no’s” will help you determine where they are in the buying process. As with everything we do in sales: the more we listen, the better the results.