Slowing Down
This is Chapter 1 from my book The Slow Sale: How Slowing Down Wins More Deals available on Amazon.
A few years ago, I took a family vacation during the first year of launching my startup. It forced me to slow down and reflect. Rather unintentionally, I got off the hamster wheel and discovered what I now call the Slow Sale. During this week in paradise, while I thought I was dropping the ball, I was actually making the best discovery of my business career.
When my co-founder Ryan Huff and I first started Cirrus Insight, we both wore more than a few hats.
Ryan spearheaded the architecture and product and managed our team of engineers, who were all contractors at the time. I led “go-to-market,” a big bucket that included sales, marketing, and support.
If a phone call, support ticket, or potential sale was in the queue, I handled it. I enjoyed the hustle, keeping up with hundreds and soon-to be thousands of people going through trials of Cirrus Insight. We were trying to convert them into customers, and once they were paying us to provide a service, we wanted to keep them happy.
We had bugs to squash, pre-sale questions to answer, and support issues to address—challenges with the young product and with people’s use of it.
During that chaotic season, my wife and I decided that we needed to get away for a few days with our 2-year-old daughter and infant son.
I can’t remember where we went, but I remember how I felt – a persistent, buzzing nervousness. I didn’t want to lose my cadence. My target was always inbox zero, every day, even on the weekends. Hundreds of emails in response to hundreds of emails flew from my fingertips. I’d grind down the pile from 4am to 7am, and then again late at night. Despite the volume, I had always managed to stay on top of all my follow-ups.
My process was to be relentless. I followed up on deals every day. So there I was supposed to be relaxing, and all I could think about was how these exciting deals must be going down the crapper without my constant vigilance. I was especially worried about three prospective customers. I had negotiated terms with all of them and now I was waiting on the contracts.
I felt like any time away from the computer and the phone threatened to undo my hard work. I always had deals pending – but these three were particularly big and important – and not following up on them was feeding my listlessness and anxiety.
Sales guilt plagued me. I wasn’t hounding my biggest deals until I closed them with the help of an arsenal of catch phrases:
“How was the budget meeting? I’m eager to hear if we’re a go.”
“Let me know if I can answer any questions. We can schedule the kickoff with your team when you’re ready.”
“Any update on your end before the weekend? You can reach me any time.”
When go-getters can’t advance the deal, when our drive and energy have no outlet, anxiety hurries our minds down dark paths. We start imagining everything that can go wrong:
What if they feel neglected?
What if they walk away?
What if we lose momentum?
What if this kills our sales numbers for the month?
What if the company fails after all our hard work?
Such daydreams make for a very pleasant vacation indeed. Good luck unplugging, Anxious Founder!
So how did my vacation affect those three big deals? All three closed.
Signed, sealed, and delivered.
In retrospect, I can understand what happened. By letting the deals rest, I was forced to trust that I had done the work.
I had provided the information that each prospect had requested.
I had made myself available during the trial period.
I had helped each prospect establish use cases.
We had negotiated pricing and terms.
Then, this Quiet Period came to roost on the deals. Activity and communication slowed down and even stopped altogether for the better part of a week. To me, it felt like the deals were dead.
Was the appropriate response more frenetic activity? A flurry of emails? Wearing down their resistance with my sales catchphrases and phone calls?
No.
Though at the time I had no appreciation for a Quiet Period, I accidentally made the right move. The deal rested. Each prospect sat in peace. They all had time and space to consider the deal, identify the budget needed for it, and go through the internal processes necessary to get that budget approved.
Best of all, those prospects came back to me. I learned that patience should be part of my sales process.
Hustle needs to be a part of any effective sales playbook, but so does a Quiet Period – a vacation for each deal.
My deals revealed a need by prospects, especially the really big ones, to take some quiet time to work through their buying process.
It’s been said that time kills deals, but unfortunately that trite phrase too often sends salespeople into a nervous tailspin of activity. Time can also deliver deals and save deals. The key, of course, is the wise use of time.
My deals also reminded me to trust our product. I let three big prospects think the deal through, and the fact that they came back validated our product-market fit. I didn’t force the deal and I couldn’t force it. They had to choose us.
If Cirrus Insight hadn’t been a strong solution for those companies, then given the time they had, they would have walked away.
Instead, the quality of the product sold them.
The more the decision makers thought about it, the more their users asked them to buy it for them. The likelihood that they would come back and sign the deal increased when I was patient.
Closing these deals became a turning point for me as a co-founder and salesperson. I learned valuable lessons about responsiveness and confidence.
I already knew to stay on top of my follow-ups because I could see my hustle nudge deals forward. Staying on top of the customer’s questions just made common sense. And research suggests that the faster that you respond to questions, the better. As customers, we often purchase from the first vendor who actually answers questions competently and quickly.
But I learned not to conflate customer-focused responsiveness with sales-focused over-communication. The latter is annoying to the customer and postpones or even prevents the Quiet Period necessary for many deals to close.
That’s where the concept of the Slow Sales comes into play.
Deals have a cadence. They progress in both sprints and walks.
You answer a dozen rapid-fire questions, and then your prospect goes quiet.
When they come back online, you do a pilot. You answer more questions. They go dark again.
Then, you negotiate legal. Things get quiet.
Then, you talk with procurement. More quiet.
Finally, you have a signed deal. You almost can’t believe it.
What was with all those quiet spells? Your prospect was probably putting out fires, answering other emails, generally doing business and life and frying bigger fish.
That’s where sales reps often get in their own way. It’s hard for them to pull back from the deal, which may be of critical importance to them, and to recognize that their prospects have other responsibilities and priorities. While we salespeople try to act like highly confident professionals, most of us feel a sense of nervousness about almost every deal. Like athletes and actors, salespeople benefit from a certain level of anxiety.
Too often, we let a prospect’s silence turn up the volume on our anxiety when we could simply recognize, “Okay. Now we’re in a Quiet Period. Time to focus on other prospects and priorities myself and hope for the best.”
Getting comfortable with sprints and walks gives you the perspective you need to learn the cadence of your own sales process.
You can begin to recognize trends, ride them, close more deals, and experience less anxiety along the way.
You can sell smarter, not harder.
You can also go farther by moving more slowly. Go full speed ahead all the time, and you will wear out your prospect and yourself.
As for Cirrus Insight, we eventually got more sophisticated and hired some analysts to mine our sales data. I’ve got pretty good instincts, but you can’t scale a software startup based on one person’s hunches. You need data to drive decisions.
When our analysts started looking at the data related to when our sales would close, we saw distinct phases of activity:
- Onboarding – In the early phase of the sales process, a barrage of emails, phone calls, GoToMeetings demos, and calendar events fly both ways.
- Trial – The prospect then goes into a trial. Once the trial begins, some messages trickle back and forth.
- Problem-Solving – Soon enough, the volume picks back up again as we identify our customer’s problems and help to solve each one.
- Negotiation – We figure out pricing and terms.
- Quiet Period – Once we come to terms, a week or two of very little communication happens.
- Closing – The prospect reappears, and we sign the deal. (INSERT SALES ACTIVITY GRAPHIC)
Our data proved that the sales process wasn’t as simple as a flurry of activity and then a closing. Our best deals aren’t hustle and sign.
No, a lull follows the storm.
The lull is a scary time for a salesperson because you feel like you’ve invested tons of time and energy into the deal and you realize it might not close.
The customer could walk away, and you’d have nothing to show for your effort.
That voice in your head starts up: “You’re not hitting quota. You’re not getting the commission. You weren’t successful.”
You start to miss the adrenaline rush of closing the deal and serving the customer, and you tell yourself that you can’t leave the customer in the dark. You want to follow up and maintain that constant communication.
But in doing so, you sometimes kill the deal.
It’s true. We have to step back and realize that constant communication is really just anxiety management for us. We need to feel like we’re being proactive and serving the customer because the Quiet Period makes us uneasy.
What we must remember is that the sale is about the customer.
At the end of the day, the customer runs this deal. The customer determines the cadence, the sales process. By weaning ourselves off of constant reinforcement and constant feedback from the customer, we can arrive at sales maturity and let the customer sit in peace.
Gaining a level of comfort with the Quiet Period will help you close more deals.
And that’s the punchline of the Slow Sale. Slow down. Give prospects the space to make their decision. They have the information they need. Let them sit in their need, and come back ready to sign. Let them close themselves.
That was the important lesson for me: When you’ve done your work on a deal, you can then step away from the deal without killing it.
Don’t you often need time to make up your mind?
When we human beings evaluate a purchase—anything from software to bath towels—we frequently do all of this homework. We vet options and vendors. We solicit bids and proposals. We weigh price and value.
If we’re printing t-shirts, we’ll do test runs. The team will get together, and someone will say, “We need to decide on this.” Someone else will interject with a higher priority, and the t-shirt order goes on the backburner.
We don’t revisit the decision until an event looms on the horizon. Then we pull the trigger quickly because the need is more pressing.
We’ll sit and wait on software purchases, too. We stop pinging the vendor with questions. We are 99% there, but we haven’t executed the contract yet. For the vendor to hound us at that point would just get on our nerves.
So, pay attention to your own behavior. Your customers are probably a lot like you.
Follow the Golden Rule of Sales: Sell to them the way you want to be old to. Honor the Quiet Period. Give them space. Take a vacation every once in a while. Make the Slow Sale.
This is Chapter 1 from my book The Slow Sale: How Slowing Down Wins More Deals available on Amazon.