You make a good point – sometimes clients put things in the way to create a smoke screen whilst they determine whether they really want your product/service or not, or find a way (or pluck up the courage) to say No, Goodbye for good. It’s a common cause of the Maybe.

If our client is niggling about price then we tend to get No (a position that can be negotiated from.) If it’s the long drawn out Maybe then these ‘qualification’ tactics or similar are used to get us to walk on our own accord!

Those are some fun “tricks”.

When I was in IT sales, my company was a big fan of the Sandler method. One of their tricks I really liked was to look for a way to say NO in the first five or ten minutes of a meeting.

Let’s say you’re introducing your company to a new prospect and the prospect says something like “for us to do any work together you’ll need to respond to our vendor qualification document put out by the Purchasing department.” Now, we all know these “qualification” processes generally lead nowhere good. So I might have responded “I appreciate where you’re coming from Mr. Client, but my company has a policy of not participating in vendor qualification programs. We find that purchasing-led efforts to qualify technology vendors to be very ineffective, even detrimental to eventual project results. In the interest of maintaining our reputation in the marketplace, we will only work with company leadership with a direct, vested interest in the actual project.”

Now there is a real possibility you may lose the business here, so you have to be prepared for that. But Sandler would tell you that if you do, it’s probably not business you wanted anyway.

The upside is that if the prospect “comes to your rescue”, then psychologically they are now in your corner and the odds are very good you will close some business.

Sandler is all about not wasting time pursuing eventual NO’s. I found this to be a valuable technique to identify more YES’s.