Prospects Who Can’t or Won’t Say No

Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

When we think about prospects who can't or won't say no, and we think about people who tend not to respond to us, prospects who don't reply back after they've gotten all the information, it's basically two pieces of the same puzzle. When we run into these situations, our goal needs to be driving them to the no, if we can't drive them to the yes. Because the maybes, as we know, the maybes will kill us all the time. David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing prospects who can't or won't say no. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. Great to be with you again. You know, there's so much to cover about how to deal with prospects. You really have to be thinking in depth about, who are these clients who can't or won't say no? Do you even recognize that? Because that's going to affect how you spend your time. Will you be working with them? Are they worth the time? Things like that. David: Yeah. And it ties back exactly to our last podcast where we were talking about prospects who don't respond to you. We're actually talking about clients who don't respond to you. And then we got carried away with clients. We said, okay, we'll talk about prospects in the next episode. And this really ties together nicely because in many cases, the people who can't or won't say no to us are the very same people who end up going radio silent and just ghosting us. When we're trying to get a sale closed. Jay: Yeah, and I think it's, again, we need to track and keep records. We need to be able to know, like, I have a system where I get a reminder. Hey you know, it's my CRM. The last time I spoke with a potential client, I made a note. Remind me about this client in five days, if you're running through a lot of potential prospects, you're not going to remember your last conversation. You're not going to remember, are they one of these clients that we're talking about? So tracking and, searching for this particular concept, are they saying no? Can they say no? A very important part of the process. David: Yeah, and that's where I think the notes that we keep for ourselves inside our CRMs or wherever we document that stuff are so important, because if we're just saying follow up, follow up, follow up in our notes, that tells us nothing. So a lot of times it's really good in our next set of notes to say, spoke with Joe yesterday, he indicated he'd have a decision by such and such a date, so that when you contact him on that day, you say, hey, listen, when we last spoke, you said you have a decision today at 1230. What are you thinking? Right. And you can move forward from there. But when we talk about people who can't or won't say no, I think this is where I've had several epiphanies along the way, because I think in sales, our desire is always to get them to say yes. But, in reality, sometimes we are better off getting them to say no. Because these non decisions are just killers. And sometimes people, they just can't bring themselves to say they don't want to do it. Whether it's fear of missing out, or they don't want to hurt our feelings. I don't know what it is, but I know that whenever I run into it, I find it extremely frustrating, because I'm a pretty direct communicator. If you and I are having a conversation, I will tell you exactly what I think. I mean, I won't be rude about it. I won't be obnoxious, in most cases, right? But I'll be very direct because I feel like I owe that to every person I talk to. If we're talking about working together, I want to make sure that people are extremely clear on what we'll be able to do and what we won't be able to do. And we can't do anything until we get to that agreement. I mean, I say this all the time, whenever two parties to an agreement want to put something together, they'll figure out a way to do it. If one of them doesn't, they won't. And very often the one who doesn't is the prospect.