Written by: Ken Kupchik
Every salesperson loves when an easy-to-close deal comes in. It doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally you’ll get a lead or a phone call from someone who knows all about your product, knows how much it costs, and knows that they’re ready to buy. These types of deals can be great, because they go smoothly and get you some new business quickly.Most deals don’t happen like this.
Most deals involve prospecting, sales presentations, answering questions, and a not insignificant amount of follow up…basically all of the things salespeople get paid to do. You’d be hard pressed to find salespeople who would say that it doesn’t take some effort to get most of their deals closed.(Although you can make it easier with a sales automation CRM, like Spiro!
Want to see how?)However, once in a while, you’ll come across potential deals that are really, really difficult to close. I came across one like this years ago, and the reason it was so difficult was because the person I was trying to reach wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. Meaning they simply wouldn’t respond to any of my messages! In order to close it, I had to get really, really creative.
The Customer
I was working for an automotive marketing company, and we really needed to get this prospect’s attention in order to work out a mutually beneficial business deal. It was my job to make this happen. Unfortunately,
every single message I sent to this person would get zero response. They truly wanted to nothing to do with me.I needed to do something different if there was to be any hope whatsoever of closing this deal. So I came up with a plan!I knew that the deal we were prepared to offer made a lot of sense for the prospect, and that all I needed to do was to get his attention. But that was proving to be more difficult than I thought. Since I had been following the prospect’s activity on social media, I knew that he and his company were in the middle of a fairly aggressive campaign against a competitor. The story was a bit complicated, but ultimately this company and its competitor were both competing in the same space and having a fairly public war of words.Related:
5 Non-Obvious Ways to Improve Your Sales So here’s what I did…
I wrote an article on my company’s website about the heated competition between the prospect and his competitor. I took a neutral, journalistic stance on the whole situation so as not to come off as too pandering. But I wrote about the available facts and framed it as a “Who is going to win the battle?” story.And then I sent it to prospect with a note that said, “Hey, we wrote an article about you, we thought you’d enjoy reading it!”Within a few minutes I had a response from the prospect, the lines of communication were open, and we ended up
closing the deal and doing business with him and his company! All it took was doing something of value to get his attention.Of course, not every salesperson will have the same type of situation available to them to make inroads, but if the potential deal is important enough, and you’re willing to think outside of the box to find a solution, you can always at least figure out a clever way to get yourself in front of someone that wants nothing to do with you to
give them your pitch!
