If you’ve spent any time in sales, you have had a Zombie Prospect. You spent time preparing a great sales presentation. You navigated the organizational hierarchy, made the requisite small talk, and assuaged the fears of a skeptical purchasing department to deliver your proposal. You handed it over with a smile and your prospect said they would have an answer for you “in a few days.”
That was six months ago.
You’re not even sure if your contact still works there because she stopped returning your phone calls four months ago. But still it sits in your pipeline, and you ritualistically review its painful existence in weekly sales meetings.
You don’t get it. Your product seemed to be a good fit. The specs were right. The price was discounted below market rates. Your child even goes to the same elementary school as your buyer’s kid. This is the third time this has happened in the last two quarters.
Why do these prospects go full-on Walking Dead?
Most likely, they were never qualified in the first place. There are three things that need to exist in every opportunity to justify going through the pain and anguish of a modern sales process.
- Ability to Buy — I know this seems obvious but there are several reasons why a buyer may not have the ability to buy.
- There may be no budget for the purchase or that allocation hasn’t been approved prior to your sales engagement of the buyer. In many cases, you called them—so they could be taking a meeting with you without the financial means to purchase anything.
- They may be contractually obligated to a competing solution and breaking that agreement would be costly.
- Buyers can window-shop for products and vendors just to see what’s out there. When you offer them a proposal, they would be silly not to take it.
- State of Flux — Something in their market, industry, or organization is changing and it’s forcing them to reconsider their ability to cope with that change. Starbucks started as a place to buy espresso machines and coffee equipment. Imagine if you were the commercial paper manufacturer that pitched Howard Schultz on your coffee cup line right after he returned from Italy and decided to open European style coffee houses all over the world.
- Urgency — There’s a penalty to the buyer if they don’t act. These penalties can range from financial penalties, increased risk, or loss of some competitive advantage.
Without these, you end up with prospects that never make a decision, or keep asking for additional information or changes to the original proposal. You get delegated to an assistant. There is some new “boss” that is reviewing it. The final approval is just a “week away.”
After about 30 days of being increasingly placated, you can’t even get your prospects to answer the phone or return an email.
You officially have a Zombie.
Salespeople are notorious for chasing bad deals. Once we admit that an opportunity is terrorizing a small village and eating brains for breakfast, we have to take it out of our pipeline, justify why the sale went south to our management, and accept that all of that effort was wasted.
The best treatment is prevention. This requires both the salespeople and their management to allow them to justify walking away from opportunities that aren’t qualified. Trust me—this takes a level of discipline and trust in your salespeople many managers aren’t capable of deploying.
Adding this kind of qualification demands some longer-range perspective. The amount of time spent wasted on deals that were never going to close is time that could have been spent building more reliable pipelines and closing credible opportunities.
If you’re a manager, let your salespeople walk away from unqualified leads. If you’re the salesperson, your sales skills are best spent on opportunities that aren’t half-dead already.
Survive the zombie apocalypse with Engagement Selling System. Learn more or enroll.