DEALING WITH THE WEIGHT OF WAIT

Most of us abhor the dreaded weight. For us in the Sales and Business Development fraternity, there is an equally feared term: The Wait! We all have been in this position so many times : applied all our sales models diligently, have all the 6Gs in control (You can read about the 5Gs of Tactical Sales Decision Making here and about the 6th G here) and we get to hear the very common line :

"We will get back to you, please wait."

This could be during the phase of short-listing, at the end of the reference check and most critically after an exhausting series of negotiations. So, what can, and should we do if anything at all during this period?

One of my earliest mentors gave me a piece of valuable advice: Waiting is never a strategy! We may rather gamble or place a bet and wait for a favourable outcome. Of course, the underlying assumption is that we have done our homework well : Gritted it out, had the Guts to get a Grip on the situation, listened to our Gut and Got Across to our champion/ sponsor. I have personally done and observed my wonderful seniors, colleagues and juniors deploy some of these strategies: going by my love of models: I call this is the HEPTA-R:

RESPECT the customer's decision-making process and the fact that there are focus groups and multiple stakeholders who need to take collective decisions.

RECITE our prayers, thank the 5th G - God for our successes and learnings from failure, have faith in His Infinite Wisdom and Grace and pray to Him to bestow upon us the strength to deal with bad news.

REVALIDATE and REVISIT our value-proposition, competitive differentiation, and stakeholder mapping throughout the Sales Cycle. This is especially necessary during dynamic periods such as customer organisational changes and entry of new competitors. We could also smartly check competitor touchpoints and social media interaction with our customer as well. With our customer, we should at regular intervals keep on asking for feedback and offer to address any new queries.

REINFORCE our value-proposition, share similar success stories and testimonials, relevant company news, blogs, and happenings all without being pushy and imposing. Our most professional customers like associating with professional vendors and partners as well.

RESIST excessive follow-ups through phone, email, social, doing unsolicited discounting and freebie offerings.

RECOUNT our past wins and learnings from losses; this is especially useful during periods of frustration and anxiety.

REPLICATE funnel of similar value-propositions and use cases. This cannot be overstated: Sales is a high-risk profession, and the magic is to always have an X (value varying from industry to industry) multiple prospect base. If we are in the final stages of vendor selection, our value-proposition is indeed compelling and we could use this period in building a further robust pipeline. What better place to start than with similar use cases with other prospects, especially the ones in a similar customer industry.

There, will of course be situations especially during formal tenders and RFPs where the Revalidation and Reinforcement Stages will be curtailed and may be in contravention of the Customer Procurement Code of Conduct. Even then, we do have the remaining 5 Rs as our armour in this tense and uncertain period!

Would love to hear some thoughts, comments, and examples of what our fraternity has done: What has worked and what has not!