9 guaranteed ways to squander your clients.
If you are in business development, especially for B2B software solutions, you have to sell. You have targets, you have a quota, you need that commission.
There’s always going to be someone on the receiving end of these pitches and requests for meetings. In various places I have worked at, I’ve always been that person. Something to do with understanding business needs but also knowing technology.
The inspiration for this piece comes after numerous interaction with business development and sales professionals across industries and countries. Without fail, there are some business development professionals that lose their way and go rogue. Almost as if they want to lose their prospective clients. So I figured why not offer a helpful list on how to lose a client, in case that’s what you’d like to do.
This list is in no specific order. If you’d like to maximize your chances of rejection, I’d suggest you pursue more than one approach simultaneously. However, if you’d like to reduce chances of being avoided/rejected, avoid doing taking any of the approaches below.
Approach #1 / Be Clingy
Call me on the phone every. single. day.
“I’m calling to see whether you got my email and if you needed any help”.
Yes thank you my email has been functioning perfectly for the last 5 years, I doubt your PowerPoint attachment broke it. I’ll be in touch if I need help reading basic English.
The following day:
“Good morning! Since you didn’t answer my email yesterday, I thought I’d call back and check if everything is okay.”
Oh it’s not okay.
“Hello again! I’m calling to let you know that we are adding a new feature to our product that allows you to upload directly from Dropbox!”
Thanks for the voice version of your changelog, now please give me some space.
Approach #2 / Become a Detective
Do the following: Use my work email and what you know about me to find my LinkedIn profile. Once you have that, it’s easy to find me on Facebook, Skype, and Twitter.
On Facebook, like my profile picture (but don’t add me as a friend, you don’t want to be unprofessional!). If I made a comment on a group that we both are members of (or a page we both follow), make sure to like my comment and respond to it with “yes”.
On Skype, send that waving emoji.
On Twitter, like/retweet one of my old tweets.
That will win you a commercial agreement, and a restraining order.
Approach #3 / “May I Speak to the Manager”
After I express that we are not interested in the product you’re offering, find a way to establish contact with my colleagues, regardless of their position in the company, and start messaging them on LinkedIn. Of course, the outcome of this is that they’ll get in touch and say “this person got in touch with me about his/her product, I’m connecting them to you so you’d decide on next steps forward.”
Things are going to go very well from this point.
Approach #4 / “I know what’s good for you”.
Bathe me in the fountain of your knowledge. You know the industry, you know your product. Sometimes, I feel like you know me better than I know myself.
Pretend my role doesn’t exist. When we talk, make it clear that I have no clue what I’m doing, but thankfully you know your own job AND mine AND my company’s needs, which is why we must subscribe immediately.
Approach #5 / Do this →🙉
Salesperson: “Good morning Nadim, I’m writing to see when you’d be interested in starting a trial of our software.”
Me: “Actually we discussed internally and we won’t be using your software as it’s not aligned with what we need”.
- “Great! I’m not in town this week but perhaps next week I can come to your office and we can discuss details”
- “I don’t think you heard me, we are not intere-…”
- “We’ll give you an additional free license as well!”
- “I’m going to hang up now.”
Approach #6 / Ask if my cute colleague can also join us for a meeting, you know what I mean, 😉
No, not 😉. Not at all. Blocked.
Approach #7 / “It’s Classified”
I know it may sound cool to say things like “that’s classified”. But if I ask you how does your technology accomplish X, and your answer is “That’s a trade secret ;)” you’re going to set off all my alarms. If you’d like to shoot for the go for the 3 in 1 package, say something like “It’s a trade secret, anyway it’s complicated”. That way you’ll be patronizing, push me away from your product, and demonstrate to me that you have no idea about what I asked you.
Approach #8 / The Hesitant Breakup
“Since you did not respond to my phone calls, I assume that you are not interested in discussing our great product further. This is quite unfortunate as I was hoping that we could have a fruitful collaboration. I will stop calling you [as you requested repeatedly]. Farewell.
p.s. Can we arrange a call so I can tell you about our other, equally irrelevant product?”
Okay bye. I will spend the rest of my life wondering about what could have been
Approach #9 / The Bait & Switch.
I saved this one for last. It happened recently and the audacity of it all blew my mind. Someone on LinkedIn got in touch regarding a software development opportunity asking if I’m interested or if I might know someone and if I’m available for a quick call to discuss in detail.
Sure. I sent my phone number assuming I’ll find out about some dev opportunity that I can share with my various coder friends. I got the call and it went something along the lines of:
“First let me tell you about our company”
“Sure..”
“What do you know about Forex trading?”
“I know some, what is the opportunity that you mentioned over LinkedIn?”
“Excellent! I’m glad you’re interested to hear more. This is a great opportunity for you to invest with us and make money that’s tax free.”
“This wasn’t the original discussion, I’m not interested in Forex trading.”
“That’s because you don’t know enough about it, let me explain to you…”
I understand it’s not easy to sell. It is, however, easy to lose a client, if you do the above.
I’m sure there are more. Feel free to share them in comments or send them to me directly to Nadim Rifai. We can then compile a part 2 to this.
