“But that is impossible!”
A look of fear crept across his face. Fear and incredulity. “But that is impossible!”
I thanked my listener. So many times that thought must cross the minds of people who attend our workshops and read our blogs and books. He had the courage to voice his misgivings. Of course they were far more than misgivings; I had appeared to refute the laws of physics. I might just as well have told him Sandler had found a way to defeat gravity. I had indeed dismissed the accepted laws of selling.
What had I just told him? That it is perfectly possible to regularly do business without a proposal or quote or presentation or pitch. We might have to do all these things, but quite often we do not need them. That is what my confused prospect could not accept. His whole value in the world was based around proving just how creative he was in order to get business. I was now suggesting that this was not the easy, effective way to land his new business.
There is nothing against doing it that other way. No problem at all. Most consultancy business and indeed most of all business is won that way. So there cannot be much wrong with doing pitches, presentations, tender demonstrations and quotes.
A question, though. How can our prospect know just how good we are going to be for them before they have tried us out? How can they be sure their experience is going to match up to how others have found it? Will it be sufficient to show what we have done for someone else? Perhaps we could show an example from a competitor of theirs that we have worked with in the past. A graphic designer used to use a presenting file showing all his old work so that he could flick past all his fabulous designs before settling on precisely the right page. That would suggest his offering would not be exclusive to his potential client. What they were going to get was a re-work of some idea already used and out there. Not very reassuring, competing with a similar competitor with a similar solution.
Perhaps we can show an example from another field. But that does not prove we can do anything in this sector.
Perhaps, and this is what tends to happen, we can show them something specific for our prospect, totally tailored. But then we will end up having to point out that this is the first draft only and probably will not look anything like the finished article. So we end up doing the work twice, once wrong to try and convince them, and then again right when we actually do the work.
A marketing firm ended up, in their own presentation meeting, pleading with their prospect to ignore the whole presentation that had just shown. They realised that their prospective client had wrongly briefed them and was about to conclude that they could not fulfil what was needed. A scrabble back to safety followed, with the agency desperately back-peddling and fighting against their own presentation. Does this look familiar?
None of these ways of trying to prove worth can be very efficient, by their very nature.
So what is the solution? Well, the obvious answer must be not to get into the situation where we are having to prove ourselves in the first place! If you are based in Surrey, Kent, Hampshire or Berkshire and you want to know how? Contact me on paul.glynn@sandler.com