When No Action is Better Than Random Activity

The Sales Bargain
At the heart of every sales interaction is a bargain struck between the customer and you, the seller. The customer agrees to invests some of their limited time in you. And, in return, they have the very reasonable expectation that they will receive something of value from you.

A problem arises when that bargain runs into silence. For some reason, one of your qualified prospects goes silent. You thought everything was going well and suddenly, there’s nothing. Salespeople hate emptiness. And silence. It makes them nervous. In the mind of a salesperson, only bad things can be happening if the customer isn’t communicating on your schedule.

Avoid Random Sales Activity

Salespeople, like nature, hate a vacuum and rush to fill it with unfortunate “check-in” calls and spurious “just touching base” emails. Like a love-struck teen-age boy endlessly texting his new girlfriend seeking reassurance that she still likes him. In this case, it’s a salesperson using random, valueless sales activity in order to demand time from from their customer in order to be reassured that they haven’t been forgotten. And this is when the bargain begins to unravel because the salesperson wants to consume some of the customer’s time without providing anything of value in return.

The fact is that your customers have a myriad of tasks that they need to accomplish within a 24 hour day. Only one of which is evaluating your product or service for purchase. It would be great if you were your customers’ highest priority at all times and that they kept to a predictable schedule in their buying process. But, life intervenes and sometimes there will be quiet periods in a customer’s buying process during which you won’t have visibility into what they are doing or thinking.

But is random sales activity the best way to get them to re-engage? Or, is it even necessary? The answer is no. In fact, sometimes no action is better than doing something.

Make Every Sales Touch Count
Always keep this top of mind: Each and every sales interaction you have must move your prospects at least one-step closer to their goal of making a smart decision. Wasting prospects’ time bombarding them with random “sales activity,” hoping something will make them give you some time, is not going to win you the business.

Don’t take this personally: but a buyer wants to spend as little time with you, or any salesperson, as possible. The objective of their buying process is to quickly gather the information they need to make an informed purchase decision with the least investment of their time possible. Breaking the bargain and wasting their time with “check-in” calls

In fact, in sales, less is often more. You will increase your chances of winning new business if you can minimize the number of sales touches that you require to deliver the information and insights that will enable your prospects to make good decisions quickly.

Your prospects give you their time. What are you giving them in return? If you don’t live up to your end of the bargain to deliver something of value each and every time you interact with your prospect, you shouldn’t expect that they will either.