Believe it or not, businesses evaluate your company during the sales process and you may be eliminated without knowing it before you submit your final proposal. While this seems obvious, most businesses are moving at 100 miles per hour and don’t take the time to analyze how they interact with potential customers during the sales process.
A couple of years ago, I did a consulting project for a client and interviewed several of their customers as well as companies that took their business elsewhere. There was a common theme among all companies – during the sales process they evaluated potential vendors based on the following criteria:
- Response time
- Quality of their response
- Company reputation
- Price
I was surprised how important the first two points were for these companies. But when they explained their reasoning, it made perfect sense. If a vendor takes a long time to get back to us during the sales process, what will it be like when they have a signed contract? I experienced this hand when I was looking for a telesales firm. I reached out to several firms via e-mail and phone. Only one firm actually got back to me and it took over a week. These are telesales firms specializing in sales! It blew my mind. Needless to say I went elsewhere.
What are the common causes for a slow response? For the sake of argument, let’s eliminate laziness because I’m not sure there is a cure for that. The main problems are poor communication and no proposal management processes.
Let’s talk about communication first. The Internet and PDAs (Blackberry, Smart Phones, iPhone) phones have significantly changed customer expectations. It is rarely ok to wait even a day to respond to requests from potential customers. Most businesses expect an initial response from potential suppliers within a few hours. Companies that wait a day or more to acknowledge a potential customer are usually out of the running before the race even starts.
If your initial response is quick, the next hurdle is quickly understanding the customer’s requirements and providing a quality proposal in a reasonable time frame. Most sales people either use one of their past proposals as a starting point or send out an e-mail to their colleagues requesting a proposal that closely meets the customer’s requirements. If a sales person’s past proposal is solid, no problem. The problem arises when they send out an e-mail asking a colleague if they have a proposal that meets their prospect’s requirements. Their colleagues are busy managing their own opportunities/customers and typically don’t respond for a day or more. Even if another rep does respond in a reasonable time frame, it usually takes several e-mails to get the right information. As a result, it takes much longer to produce a quality proposal than it should.
If your competitor responded in half the time, guess who’ll win.