At Microsoft, in early 2001, we were preparing for the launch of the next version of Windows. The job of our sales team was to get top target companies to install and use our software six months prior to launch. This was so they could give us feedback and so we could reference their success as part of our launch messaging. We called this an early adoption program.
Roger and Jennifer were two of our newest salespeople. Roger had the responsibility for convincing his major customer in California to join the early adoption program, while Jennifer was assigned to a key opportunity in Texas.
Roger got right on his task and, after one meeting in California, he got an emphatic yes from his customer. His contact, a Procurement Director in the IT organization, said they would be excited to join our early adoption program. Roger proudly logged the win in our CRM tool.
Jennifer also immediately scheduled meetings in Texas. Over a period of two months, she was told no by four different customer contacts. However, in each meeting she learned about different concerns held by multiple influential people. After each meeting Jennifer worked with our product teams to get answers to the customer’s questions and, on her fifth trip to Texas, she got a yes from their VP of Marketing.
Fast-forward three months when the early adoption program was expected to be fully operational. Roger’s customer had not yet completed the implementation of our products – the same people were still asking basic questions and Roger had not found other influencers or decision-makers. Jennifer’s customer was fully implemented. She was working with dozens of people from disciplines ranging from engineering to public-relations, and they had uncovered many areas where the program and product needed improvement.
Roger failed where Jennifer succeeded.
What was the issue? – Yes is not always yes. The instant “yes” that Roger got was made before the customer had enough information to know if this was a viable action. That and he got the yes from a person who was not a decision-maker. In Roger’s case, yes was an intention not a decision. Jennifer’s multiple meetings ending in “no” required her to address the customer’s concerns, to ensure this was a viable action for both companies. She got buy-off from key influencers and decision-makers. Their eventual yes was a decision not an intention.
Why did this happen? – Roger didn’t fully qualify his customer. He failed to assess the decision-making ability of the people he was working with and thus didn’t help the right people understand what it meant to be part of the program. Jennifer asked one simple question of her multiple contacts to both assess their decision-making capability and to determine whether her customer was a viable candidate for our early adoption program.
What was Jennifer’s one simple question to qualify and close?
If you tell me yes today, what will we do tomorrow?
Jennifer may not have used these exact words each time, but at the end of each of those five discussions she wanted to know the best next actions should the customer start this program tomorrow. In the first four meetings she got answers like:
- “Well, we’d have to make sure our VP of Marketing is on-board.”
- “You’d have to give me a few weeks to get the division heads in line.”
- “I’d need you to present the program to our VP of Operations in order for us to get the funding.”
- “Oh, we couldn’t start tomorrow. There’s way more things we’d need to know before we could start implementation.”
Each of those meetings led Jennifer to a new set of people to gather information from, which she did. That series of meetings and questions also led her to the real decision-maker. At the end of the fifth meeting she asked the question again to the VP of Marketing and the answer was definitive.
- “You’ll meet with the program team as soon as your engineers can get here. I’ll introduce you to our PR team today so you can start working on press releases. They all know you’re coming.”
This isn’t a stereotypical closing question, nor is it a tricky one. It’s simply a good selling practice that tells you where the customer is in the decision-making process. From this one question you learn if you’re talking to decision-makers who can influence others and you learn about issues that might otherwise go unsaid. Most importantly you ensure that yes is a decision, not an intention.
Again, like Jennifer, who went on to become a Director, and other successful salespeople, there are different ways of asking this question, but the best have this in their toolkit because each time you ask it, you get one step closer to yes.
©2015 Rick Wong – The Five Abilities® LLC
