1) Deal Not Qualified
Some key questions you should always be asking to better qualify your deals:
Qualification Checklist:
- Do you understand the budget?
- Do you know how the decision will be taken?
- Do you know what compelling business event is driving the project?

2) Didn’t Understand the DMU (Decision Making Unit)
It seems often when deals fall apart, turns out you were talking to the wrong people or misread a key individual involved in the selling process.
Decision Makers Checklist:
- Have you identified all the key decision makers for your deal?
- Do you know what role each stakeholder is playing in the selling process?
- Have you had conversations with each of them regarding the deal?
- Do you understand their perspectives?
- Have you addressed any barriers or concerns brought up?
The Financial Times, British industry purchasing report showed that for a customer between 200 and 400 employees the average number of buying influencers is 4.85 whereas the number of influencers called by sales people is 1.75.

3) Weak Relationships
How strong are the relationships you built during the selling process? Chances are if you answered, not strong, you lost the deal.
Relationships Checklist:
- Have you developed a strong relationship with all key decision makers for your deal?
- Do they return your phone calls?
- Do they rate you as adding value to the solution?

4) Poor Execution & Follow-up
It may be surprising but often deals are lost by fumbling the ball on some of the basic blocking and tackling to take the deal across the finish line.
Execution Checklist:
- How are quickly are you following up on action items related to your deal?
- Do you have a strategy to get your deal closed?
- Do you have all of your internal people on board to support you?
- How well do they understand the prospect?
- Have you identified key milestones for a deal?
- How are you tracking against the milestones?

5) Bad Timing
Deals often go awry when the timing is just not right. You think you have a deal ready to close and suddenly the prospect stops returning phone calls. What went wrong? Well, it turns out the need just was not there at the current moment.
Timing Checklist
- What is your prospect’s timing for making a decision? This is something you should attempt to get very early in your sales process.
- Is there a sense of urgency? Without a sense of urgency, chances are your deal with be DOA.
- What is driving your prospect’s decision on timing? Key events such as contract terminations, CEO mandates, competitive pressures and cost cutting often drive timing on decisions.

What’s your experience, why do sales deals fall apart for you?

These can be used by sales people to understand where there are gaps in their knowledge and ask questions to get a more complete picture of the customer situation.  They can also be used by sales managers to see if the sales person has control of the account.  Personally, I would often start a sales review by asking “Why us?” and “Why now?”  All the rest of the qualification flows from these two questions.  I would be looking for a crisp response to demonstrate understanding and control, and I would drill down as appropriate.  So here are a few I have thought of:

SCOTSMAN

Solution – Do we have a product or service that directly addresses their business need or do they want something that we don’t sell
Competition – Are there many competitors on this deal or are we in on our own
Only Me – Is there something that the prospect can only get from me that is critical to his decision or are we selling a “me too” solution?
Timescale – What is the prospects timescale? Will we get a rapid decision?
Size – Is the opportunity big enough to be interesting?
Money – Has the prospect got the money to afford the solution?
Authority – Are we talking to the decision maker?
Need – Why do they NEED to do this NOW, and why can’t they just wait.

MEDDIC

Metrics – What KPIs / drivers will we be contributing to – revenue, productivity, time to market?
Economic Buyer – Who will sign the contract and/or who owns the budget?
Decision Criteria – Technical and commercial criteria; their priority and our position versus competition?
Decision Process – What is The Sequence of Events?
Identified Goal – What is the Compelling Event. What is the individual or group objective? Are their serious consequences if not achieved?
Champion – Who is the Individual who has a personal win associated with the success of this project? She provides easy access to MEDDI.

TRAM BURP

Timing
Requirements
Action
Money
Budget
Uniqueness
Relationship
Priority

And two shorter ones:

BANT

Budget
Authority
Need
Timeline

£AWN

Money
Authority
Willingness
Need

Let me know any others that you use and I will add them to the resource.

A good way to think about a gaining commitment for a complex close is the commitment staircase, where each small commitment moves you forward to the overall close.

Closing is a process of:
• Clarifying and suggesting customer commitment to next steps
• Ensuring that the customer feels comfortable about his or her decision
• Supporting the customer’s acceptance (once the customer agrees to a solution)
• Gaining or requesting a commitment

Depending on the size and complexity of the sale, the next step could be to ask for the business, or it could be the next step in the customer’s buying cycle. So the sales person should be driving to the highest level of commitment they can achieve in that specific call/meeting e.g. agreeing that the proposal fully meets the customer’s needs, speaking to reference who have already implemented the solution, agreeing T&Cs, etc. In this way, we kept that great closing energy while respecting the customer’s buying cycle (more of this in the next post).

But hold-on, what about the 24 ways I learned to close – surely hard closing has its place? Yes, at a transactional sales level this is true, but I personally believe that buyers have become much more sophisticated and savvy, and so many of the well tried and tested closing techniques taught in the past seem too obvious now. But, as always, I would be interested in how you are finding the best ways to close business and whether you see the commitment staircase as a good way of thinking about the closing process.

I recently got a call from a Sales Director who said he said he wanted a 1-day closing course for his sales team because they just couldn’t close. As I tried to drill down into the detail, he got quite exasperated, and said “Look my figures back it up – the conversion rate is low, therefore they can’t close.” We agreed that I would do a small pilot which would also act as a sanity check with regard to actually what was happening (although he thought this was a waste of time).

So as experienced sales people, what do you think I found? Here are some of the highlights:
• The sales people used ABC – always be closing – they closed morning, noon and night
• They had moved from selling transactional products that could be closed in one call to more complex products and services that could take 10 calls to close
• Their behaviour hadn’t changed and they tried to close every call
• Their customers got annoyed and frustrated at their attempts to close (I will write a post regarding customer buying cycles in the next few days)
• The actual issue was that they had failed to fully understand the customer’s requirements early in the discussions (too busy closing) and hence could not link their own value proposition to the customer’s actual needs

So, we finally agreed that the training required was around understanding the customer’s needs, questioning and listening, and developing a proposal that linked the value of their solution directly to the customer’s business issues. I also developed one more idea to channel the great closing energy they had into a more appropriate customer focused sales technique that I will discuss in my next post The Commitment Staircase.