About 10 years ago, I was VP of Sales for a manufacturer. We were in the last week of a quarter and were about 20% short of our number - not good. Fortunately, we had a fat pipeline of business and a lot of opportunity to convince someone to take an order or two early. As we were strategizing in our conference room with about five people and another five conferenced in, ideas to create a sense of urgency kept being thrown out there. The idea that kept coming up was to let our VAR partners know that our lead time was significantly longer than most of their partners and we would guarantee that their order would be delivered on time if they ordered before the quarter end.
That’s what sparked one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. Seriously – this was a good one. I asked: “What if they don’t care?” What if our VAR partners don’t need our equipment right away? What if we asked them for the order early so we can guarantee delivery and they say “That’s ok man, don’t worry about it … we don’t need your stuff until the end of the project anyway.” That’s when it happened … one of the most novel ideas I’ve ever had. In fact, I think we can include this discovery with the printing press, compound interest, and the wheel. I suggested this crazy concept. Are you ready? Do you have your pen and paper ready to take notes? Here it is …
Strategy #3 to following up after delivering a proposal: Tell the truth.
In our example above, we called every one of our partners that had orders scheduled to close the next quarter and said simply: “I need a favor. We need a few extra orders to hit our number this quarter. Can you issue the xyz order a few weeks early?” That was it. That’s all we did, and it worked. We had to extend terms, but we hit our number that quarter and didn’t sell our souls. We told the truth.
In your scenario following a proposal delivery – whatever the scenario is – think about being transparent and simply telling the truth. Don’t try to create a false sense of urgency. That will just make you seem desperate and cheap. If you need a status update for your boss, let your prospect know. If your quote is expiring and your numbers from your manufacturers are expiring, let your prospect know. If you’re curious, just tell them that you’re curious. These aren’t ideal scenarios – ideally we want to be cool – but handling them in a transparent manner is 100 times better than trying to create a fake sense of urgency.
