Get two or more entrepreneurs together and in no time the topic of customers from Hades will arise. Mixed in amongst the laughter and tale telling will be the wounds that are still slow to heal. Unfortunately, in at least some of those instances, the wound is self-inflicted and could have been avoided with some prior forethought and attention to details. Most business people can feel in their gut when a sale is not going to happen, but fewer can walk away from a badly conceived lead or prospect. Their preference is to try to make the current one work out, rather than go in search of a new lead or continue prospecting. The end result is wasted time and effort, a prospective customer that will not make a purchase and the continuance of the need to find a suitable lead to pursue.

Answers To Questions

When providing a service or offering a product that the customer is to use to solve a business issue they confront there are two very important points to consider about the information being provided by the prospect or customer. The first is to be cautionary about trusting the self reported cause of the problem. A smart sales effort certainly includes asking questions of the customer like:

-What business problem is causing you to seek my or our product or service?
-Why do you think this is happening?
-What have you tried to do to address it?
-What has prevented you or the company from succeeding in addressing the problem?
-What do you think

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will be needed to correct the problem?

In much the same way that physicians conduct an examination and request patient participation, so too must the sales effort. However, just as the physician does not trust the word of the patient exclusively in determining a course of treatment, a diagnosis, or an appropriate course of action - so too should a salesperson be wary of simply accepting what is said as being the accurate, correct, or appropriate representation of what the customer needs. Just because it is asked for, does not automatically mean it is what should be sold to the customer. If the salesperson does not correctly determine the fit of the product or service to meet the business needs of the client company, the risk exists that when the product or service is purchased and fails to achieve the anticipated result, the client company will blame the salesperson and his or her company and then determine not to do business with them again, blaming the salesperson for their own incorrect assessment of the issues and problems to be confronted.

Another aspect of questions and answers is that one gets answers to the questions asked, but not to the ones unasked. What that means is that if all questions are focused on the information systems used by the prospect, because the product to be sold is computer hardware, the issue of employee turnover may not arise and can therefore not be addressed. There may be nothing inherently in need of fixing or updating or replacing with the computers, software, servers, etc. - but the business problem may be one of constantly having new employees in need of being trained, or not having sufficient clerks working at any given time to record data used for managing the business, etc.

Lesson: When approaching clients and customers, be careful to not get too focused, too quickly on a given solution in search of a business problem to be resolved.

Free Education

To remain current with the most progressive thinking about business opportunities, certain businesses rely on consultants, innovative suppliers, or vendors introducing new products, methods, or applications to existing ways of doing business. Unfortunately for the consultants, suppliers and vendors in search of new business, these companies can become terrific timewasters. What may happen is that the company requests the vendor or supplier to come in for a meeting to discuss their thinking or new item. The vendor gets excited thinking there is a sale to be made and prepares for the meeting. After the meeting, the customer stops responding to follow up requests, is hard to get on the phone, or is difficult to contact. There may be nothing at all wrong with the presentation or the thinking provided. What may have occurred is that the attendees at the meeting were only seeking to be kept current on the latest innovative ways of doing business and were not truly thinking about making a purchase or placing an order. In effect, they were using the supplier or vendor as a seminar on industry insights without paying for it.

Ways to prevent this from happening as frequently include establishing the following before making the presentation:

-Is this project budgeted (if it is not, establish where the money to fund it will come from. Most companies hold managers to a budgetary number and while there is room to swap monies from one budget to another, it often requires pre-authorization and there is no plan to do so - there is no sale possibility)?

-If the presentation is well received by you (or the group being presented to), who else has to see it before a purchase can be made (this sniffs out whether the person responsible for buying the product or service will be in attendance or not)?

-What is the purchase process once a decision to move forward has been reached (allows the vendor to understand the steps, hurdles, and process to be completed and provides insight into whether it is a slow sales cycle or a fast sales cycle)?

Priority and Costs

When working through the sales process with a customer, pay close attention to how they respond when setting up meetings, following up on requests for information, or interacting with you. If there are long delays between return phone calls or in setting up the presentation prior to the first meeting, it is not likely to be any different once the project has started. It is a low priority for the company and will receive the token attention that low priority projects receive.

If the prospect quibbles over the fees to be charged or the cost of the product or service incessantly, that is an indicator of what the project or sales process will look like through the project. Most clients recognize the relationship between costs or fees and value received and will be willing to pay more for higher value or benefit. If that is not occurring, there are questions one can ask to establish that:

-What would it be worth to your company to (reduce turnover, increase sales, minimize out of stocks, etc.) by 10%?

-If my product could help you increase your efficiency, reduce mistakes, etc. how much in cost savings would that provide?

By establishing the true worth of what is being offered, the customer is essentially sharing that the fee or cost for the product or service can be paid back within a very short amount of time or have a quick ROI. Once that has been established, it is not at all difficult to secure a sale if the only objection was price.

Surely, there are clients who are problems and make life difficult for the entrepreneur, but in at least a good percentage of cases, the entrepreneur could have foretold that a prospect would become a problem and either addressed it upfront by correctly asking appropriate questions, or determined the prospect was not a serious buyer and moved on before devoting any additional time to the prospect.

David Zahn is a serial entrepreneur and consultant to Fortune 100 businesses (www.zahnconsulting.com) as well as entrepreneurial startups (www.startupbuilder.com). His books, "How To Succeed As An Independent Consultant, 4th Ed.," and "The Quintessential Guide To Using Consultants" are frequently cited by other authors and have been used as textbooks in college and MBA classes.

The opinions expressed are the author's and not necessarily those of connpost.com. Please direct comments to cdauber@ctpost.com.