Larger organizations host award trips for their top-performing salespeople that can provide once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Some firms do these trips really well, and others don’t really know (or maybe don’t care) about making these events special. All-expenses-paid vacations in Fiji, Bora Bora, Australia, China, and other exotic destinations are the stuff of dreams for most people. Heck, when I was younger, I thought fishing at the Texas coast for the week was the good life.
Traveling the world is only for the rich and famous; that’s what I saw when I looked through the lens of my pre-professional career, anyway. Having had many more experiences since that time, I’ve come to believe that the quality of the award trips says a lot about how the organization will ultimately treat their sales staff too.
Experiencing the Rewards of a Good Year
Last year, I made my numbers and made it to club (the sales award trip club). But, even one-of-a-kind locales in exotic foreign lands were no guarantee my wife would attend the award trips with me. Prying her away from the kids and all that it entails was always a challenge.
In all fairness, three kids separated in age by about 18 months consumed her attention all day, every day, making it hard to trust anyone else with their care. I convinced her to not only go to this year’s destination but to extend our stay to a full week. I was beyond eager for an entire week on an exclusive Caribbean island, walking on puffy white beaches and snorkeling in crystal-clear water — it was going to be awesome. To top it off, the island only had two resorts so we basically had the place to ourselves.
My vacation giddiness didn’t last, though. The day before departing for the trip, my manager texted to ask for a quick call. “New, awesome opportunity,” he texted. The sales job started almost immediately after I answered his call. It was a can’t-miss kind of deal, he was just sure of it. It was supposedly sizable and looked like it would close in about three to four months. This is a great way to get a sales guy excited and in hot water with the wife who agreed to go on vacation with him….
Good News Gone Bad
As we talked more about the company, my excitement evaporated. Although it was smack in the middle of the sweet spot of our industry, the company was dwarfed by the organizations that usually bought our product.
Many years of experience chasing the wrong deals provided me with a lot of evidence that this deal had very little, if any, chance of closing. I explained all this to my manager who was new to the role. We discussed the estimated size of the license and delivery cost, which would likely consume most of one year of the technology budget for a firm this size. It seemed like a no-brainer to walk away, but my manager wasn’t buying it.
To his credit, my manager had a stellar track record as a salesman. His sales management skills, on the other hand, were pretty raw. He also happened to be a genuinely great person who’d do anything to help his sales staff.
I didn’t want to seem ungrateful so I backed down, but I hadn’t changed my mind that leaving this deal in the dust was the best move for everyone.
Working While on Vacation
The awesome deal just kept getting more awesome, though. He had saved the best for last. This wasn’t just a complete long-shot “opportunity” to sell software to a company I knew couldn’t afford it. It was a Request for Proposal (RFP) that came into our company, due the Monday after next.
If I had been a cartoon, this is where someone would have pricked the thought bubble that was playing vacation scenes on a loop. Vacation had just turned into work time in a big way.
Responding to RFPs is the one thing I loathe about being in sales. For the uninitiated, RFPs are normally documents sent to vendors for their responses to the client’s requirements. In theory, this practice helps ensure that we all are on the same page about what is being bought and sold.
Normally, those requirements take the form of lists of questions, ranging in number from 100 to over 1,000. It takes a team of people to respond to these documents due to the broad range of questions.
Clients seem to issue most of their RFPs in December with impossible turnaround times, too often with a due date on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve. I’m not one to believe in conspiracy theories, but I would swear client procurement departments make the RFP process painful just to test the tap before attempting to drain the remainder of your blood, sweat, and tears should they select your product or service.
These painful RFPs are often the brainchildren of extremely expensive consulting firms that create and (sometimes) manage the selection process. If you look at the credentials of some these RFP consultants, their knowledge of the problem space is considerably weaker than that of the client. But the client doesn’t have time to create their own RFP, so they hire and delegate the task an outside firm that often is learning on the client’s nickel. I have always suspected that vendors get paid by the volume of questions they create. I’ve replied to too many whopper RFPs for it to be a fluke.
In the end, the procedure boils down to a lengthy and expensive process where all the eager firms responding to the RFP find a way to say “yes” to every question.
Moving on to Better Opportunities
Luckily, this RFP wasn’t too long (another sign that they might not have the budget for our product?), but it still took three people about 25 hours each to complete the work while I was out, in addition to the time I spent on it myself when I should have been enjoying my time off. After I returned from vacation, I visited with my manager about my next steps with this prospective client. He was surprised that I insisted on delegating the opportunity to one of the other salespeople. He struggled to understand why I would give up after investing so much time to respond to the RFP.
I hadn’t changed my mind, but I did my part to keep the deal moving forward. I didn’t want to waste any more time pursuing work I didn’t believe was the right thing to do. It was also clear to me that even if the software closed, it would be extremely difficult to help this customer realize its value due to the professional services cost they’d need to invest to achieve their goals.
Second-Guessing Decisions
It looked like I made a mistake during the following four to five months as I saw the deal progress and appear like it was going to close. The deal was on the forecast for our business unit for over 15 months. During that time, the account executive and all the folks who make these deals happen (including technical folks and multiple levels of management) invested huge volumes of hours and travel expenses to pull this prospective client over the line.
Toward the end of its life, the deal achieved pariah status on the forecast calls. Doing nothing was the client’s final decision.
Selecting the Right Opportunities
Selecting the right opportunities to pursue can be the difference in selling one rare deal or consistently making your goal. In target account plans where the number of prospective clients is very limited, it’s easy to be tempted to chase the wrong deal.
In the case described in this post, the prospective client was simply too small. The number of employees and their client base was a glaring indicator that my product and service could never be justified by a firm of this size.
Sometimes, in very rare instances, a small company will make an investment that breaks all the qualification rules. These anomalies are held up by some in the sales organization as proof that chasing the wrong deals is the right thing to do.
Any opportunity, regardless of the company size, takes significant time and money to pursue to closure. If you pursue the wrong deal too often, you’ll miss the right opportunities happening at your target accounts.
