You have a conversation scheduled with a potential new client, and you’re excited. You get on the phone, and everything goes well; the next step is for your to write a proposal…that’s when all the energy and excitement drains out of you. Writing proposals is a drag. It takes too long; it’s tedious but somehow…
On Tuesday, we talked about how the biggest killer of B2B deals is fear of looking stupid. If your buyer isn’t 100% confident in your solution, that fear will make them hesitate and unlikely to hire you to fix the problem you uncovered. What can we do in our sales process to help buyers to…
When we are talking to a potential client, the most likely outcome is that they will do nothing. I bet if you went back through your CRM and looked at the deals that didn’t close, 75% of those prospects didn’t hire anyone to help them with their problem. This is heartbreaking – you did all…
Thanks for all the replies I got to this week’s emails – it’s easy to see that we are all experiencing similar challenges! One reply to Thursday’s email about eliminating business development follow-up was worth noting. It said, Most people, me included, lie to themselves about why things don’t work out in biz dev… self-blame,…
An agency owner asked me this question recently. I reviewed the pricing options with my client last week, but I haven’t heard back from them. How long do I wait before I send a follow-up email? The short answer is, you’ve driven into a cul-de-sac; there’s no good way out but to go back to…
We’ve been talking about the importance of building your business development muscle. If you don’t want your business to slow down when the economy slows down, you will likely need to be more aggressively reaching out to prospects to find the ones willing to invest in your services. The hardest part of outreach is the…
If the economy slows over the next 18 months winning new business will get more challenging. To keep your business strong in any economic condition, you need to upgrade your business development process. There are three critical decisions you have to make to ensure you’re able to win business in unfavorable economic conditions: Focus on…
Thanks for your replies to Tuesday’s email about making business development easy. If I could summarize the replies, they’d (collectively) say, Once I’m “in the room” with a buyer, I’m golden – but how do I get “in the room”? How do I find more people who could hire me? 1. Who are the “people…
For the last few days, I’ve been comparing the process of bringing new money into your business to the process of gathering firewood. The most common reply I’ve gotten is some form of, “Sure Brad, but gathering firewood is easy, finding clients is hard! If I could just find clients lying on the ground that…
I imagine that you’re in a cabin in the woods. You’ve been gathering firewood every day for months. Firewood is piled all the way around your cabin, and yet, you feel compelled to collect more. You have to go farther and farther to get firewood; the once beautiful forest has been stripped of anything that…