5 Signs Your Prospect Is Not Going to Buy

What is the most important thing you have as a sales professional? Think about it, I will wait. Give up? It is your time.

That is the one thing that you can never get back. Being able to know when a deal is going to go wrong and when to disqualify it is a sign of a seasoned sales professional.

There are three kinds of prospects that you will see in sales. The one who is not going to buy now, the one who might buy later and the one who will never buy. Being able to know the difference can save you time and help you disqualify the ones who will never buy.

The question is, how can you tell the difference?

Give me the price right now.

If you are talking with a prospect, and they are demanding to know the price without having seen the value of your product, that is a good sign they are using you as column fodder.

The odds are that they have already selected a vendor and are fulfilling the needs of procurement by getting pricing from other vendors. Pricing questions like this should be a red flag, and your spidey sense should be tingling you to be cautious.

No, I will not let you speak to my manager.

I always try to live by the rule of three. For a deal to be in a commit stage, I must have access to at least three people in the decision process. In a typical company with 100-500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions.

Have you ever won a sizable deal where you only spoke with one person in the organization? I am not saying that it does not happen, but the odds of it happening are slim.

Use this as a warning sign that the deal might not be as real as you think.

Can you tell me the following things?

Any opportunity you are involved in, you should be asking these three fundamental questions.

• What does success look like for this project?
• Who else will be involved in this decision?
• When do you need to have this project done by? 

If these questions are met with an "I do not know," you should consider taking a step back and reevaluating if this is a real deal.

Call me maybe.

I always try to live by the moto that maybe, is just another way of saying no. This has always helped keep myself honest when I am looking at my pipeline and evaluating what deals I should spend time on.

Ultimately, our prospects are being nice. They feel bad about saying no, so they do not say it. They string us along.

Learn to love the “no,” since that is a definite answer and means you can move on.

There is no plan in place for implementation.

An implementation plan takes a sale out of the realm of the hypothetical and into reality. A well-designed plan arms your prospect with strategies for getting a fast start with your product and is directly tied to achieving specific goals.

Prospects who are uncertain about purchasing your product will be careful not to commit to anything and will avoid an implementation plan. Use this as a gauge for if you should be investing time in this deal, or running from it.

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Questions:

Do you use an implementation guide to help close your deals?

How many people do you try to speak to in any given deal?

What are some signs that you use to know when a deal is not real?