Last week I wrote about listening to what the market is telling you. I want to stay there for one more week, because there’s one thing the market tells us all the time that most of us get pretty good at ignoring.
Silence.
Every business I’ve worked with has a pile of proposals that never got an answer. Nobody said no. Nobody went with a competitor. The emails just stopped coming back. A few months later someone tidies up the CRM, marks it “No Response,” and we all move on.
I’ve always found that label interesting. It reads like the customer did something to us. We put together a good proposal, sent it over, and they couldn’t be bothered to reply.
I’ve sent my share of proposals into that silence over 22 years in sales. When I’m honest about most of them, the deal didn’t die after I hit send. It died before I wrote it. Somewhere along the way I skipped a conversation I needed to have.
Learning from those years, there are three things I want to know before a proposal goes out:
1) Who can actually say yes? Not who I’ve been talking to, and not who asked for the quote. If I don’t know who makes the call, I’m counting on my contact to sell it internally for me. Maybe they will. Or maybe it gets forwarded to their boss with a one-line email and no context.
2) What problem are we solving, in their words? It’s easy to get excited about what we can do. It’s harder to make sure it’s something they care about. If the customer can’t explain how I solve their problem without me in the room, I’m selling something they aren’t convinced they need yet.
3) Why now? This is the easiest to skip. What happens if they do nothing? If the honest answer is “not much,” why would they work with you? We might feel the urgency. That doesn’t mean they do.
None of this wins you every deal. Budgets still get reallocated, priorities can shift, people leave, and sometimes clients just don’t reply. But if I can’t answer the three things above, I probably shouldn’t be writing a proposal yet. The better move is to go back and have the conversation I skipped, which costs a lot less than writing a proposal nobody was ready for.
Then there’s follow-up. I don’t think following up means chasing someone forever. The fourth “just checking in” email doesn’t help them or you. I’d rather be direct and get a no, or realize that I am missing information than have an open deal sit for another two months.
You’ll never get rid of every unanswered proposal, and that’s not the goal. The goal is to stop treating silence as something that happens to us. When I see a CRM full of “No Response,” I don’t think the team needs to follow up harder. I think they need to look at how they’re qualifying, what they’re choosing to propose, and how they have followed up.
What’s the most useful thing a customer ever told you once you finally asked them straight?