How to Approach Prospective Clients Stuck in The Pipeline

Have you found yourselves in a situation where you meet with a prospect for the first time? At first, it seems like everything's going well. They're eating out of your hand… and then crickets. After this, you end up thinking "Did I say something wrong? Did I offend them?"

However, 90% of the time it has nothing to do with you. Or, on the flip side, you haven't met a prospect yet and you’re trying to avoid the above situation. Either way, get them on the phone! Get to the bottom of their thought process ASAP – a lot of the time, they may be interested, but it's more of a “maybe” for them instead of a “yes”.

To give an example, a potential client may say about your event planning business: “your wedding package sounds really interesting, but it's March right now”. So they won’t be interested until August when it’s closer to their wedding date.

The strategy at that point is to do nothing until August, and then call them back when they asked me to, but by then they would have completely forgotten about you! So, to avoid something like this, the key is to tackle those prospects that are stuck in the pipeline. In addition, we also need to establish a game plan for prospects you haven't met with yet – the ones you want to make sure are engaged enough to move forward.

When we can get a meeting set with prospects that already know us and like us, it makes your sales meetings so much more effective. The same goes for those prospects who have already met with us, but feel caught somewhere in the pipe; we need a way to keep them engaged.

What we also have to remember is they're going to buy when they're ready, not when you want them to. And quite frankly, most of our prospects are ready right now. You have to remember that we come from an industry that uses sales cycles to make sales and that sales cycle can be pretty long if you’re going after larger businesses.

And so, the question is, what can you do to keep them engaged?

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