Milling around the gate where my flight was about to board, my phone buzzed from a text. American Airlines was giving me advance notice of one of the glamorous benefits of air travel. Before I could fish my phone from my pants pocket, the groans of the other text recipients indicated it was bad news.
“You are the winner of a one-hour delay, Mr. Bliss,” I thought cynically as I read my text. The folks who got the text were shuffling around looking for a place to kill the time. The delay was close to four hours by the time we actually got to board. O’Hare airport was beginning to feel like my uncomfortable second home.
Killing Time at the Airport
I bought another cup of coffee and settled into a location where I could plug in my laptop. Not long after I sat down, a lady I knew from a prospect sat down a few seats away. My team and I worked on an opportunity at her company for over a year. As she fiddled with her backpack, her gaze caught mine. My ability to recall names on a scale of 1 to 10 is about 0.5. But when faced with a surprise encounter, the name just popped out from my brain.
“Hi, Kathy, it’s David Bliss. I worked with you and your team about a year ago on your CRM project,” I said, raising my hand halfway to wave. We exchanged some general pleasantries, discovered we were on the same flight, and then quickly buried our heads in our laptops.
The first of several text updates from the airline came through, displaying the extension of our captivity at the airport. Whenever I looked up to show my contempt for this mechanical malfunction, I caught a look from Kathy, who was expressing her disgust in the same fashion. It allowed us to exchange a few more words each time we got more bad news. The third delay caused both of us to kind of throw our hands up in disbelief, but it also kicked off a great conversation between us.
Background of a Failed Sale
Kathy was the executive sponsor for the project I’d worked on. She appeared at the beginning and the end of the year-long selection process. I worked hard to get in front of her during the middle of the process, too. Getting a meeting with her tested my patience and her assistant’s desire to work with me. Over a dozen meetings were scheduled only to be canceled at the last minute.
Perseverance paid off, allowing me to eventually land two 30-minute meetings with her. Kathy’s body language said in no uncertain terms that she was annoyed that I’d squeezed into her schedule. It felt as if she’d simply given in to my persistence rather than considering ours to be an important meeting.
Granted, Kathy was one of the top eight executives of a Fortune 250 company and clearly a very busy person. Ultimately, she was going to make a decision on millions of dollars in software and tens of millions of dollars in implementation services. My mission was to form a relationship with her.
A Good Connection
Talking with Kathy at the airport that day was like connecting with a good friend from the past. She was completely different from how she had been during the cold and unproductive brief visits we shared during the sales cycle. While waiting out delay after delay, the conversation bounced around through several personal and family activities we had in common. Then, a natural pause in the dialog occurred because we both ran out of things to say.
I used the opportunity to shift our discussion and ask her what happened with the project. I already knew that after a year of work, the decision was no decision. There were only two vendors involved during the lengthy sales process, yet they still couldn’t make a decision. My goal was to figure out where I had failed.
Uncovering the Real Issues
Kathy slunk down in her chair and appeared to give the question careful consideration. She explained, “It wasn’t about the product. We knew either vendor could get the job done.” Then, she fell silent as she gave it some more thought. I slid forward in my seat in anticipation of her explanation for my failure to close this deal.
In a very crafty way, she blamed her team for not delivering the right answer.
“My vision is for our members to have a completely different experience engaging with us (her company) than with our competition,” Kathy explained simply. “I didn’t feel like my team connected with the vision of why we were going to make this huge investment.”
Knowing When to Sell and Not to Sell
I didn’t want her to feel like I was trying to use this forum to win her over. This was not the time or place for it unless she asked further questions. Carefully, I chose my last question for this topic, determined to let this conversation fade away afterward. Kathy’s answer made me wonder what had given her pause on this massive decision.
“Have you had a bad experience with a technology project on this scale in the past?” I asked.
She acknowledged that she was part of a disastrous project at another company, and many of the factors that caused that project to fail were evident in the no-decision project. Without further prompting, she filled in a few more gaps in their decision to do nothing. Then, some interruption shifted our talk to other topics.
Asking the Right Questions
It may seem obvious where both my competitor and I failed, but it’s not quite that easy. The client’s documentation described their vision for the project, and most of their team members could recite the vision, too. Where we all failed was really understanding what concerned Kathy about this project. Kathy may have felt she made her issues clear, but sometimes, they’re not so evident. One of the critical elements in any sale is to ensure each important player is understood.
“It may well be that feeling understood is a prerequisite for our other desires to be satisfyingly fulfilled.” Leon F. Selzer, Ph.D., expressed this simple thought in Psychology Today. Easy enough, but it also profoundly explained my problem closing the deal with Kathy’s company. If we apply this theory to Kathy’s no-decision, it makes complete sense why she chose to do nothing.
Although I had a few opportunities to speak directly with Kathy during the sales process, I asked the wrong questions when trying to uncover her real needs and failed to ensure that she felt understood. When you can connect with someone at this level, with genuine understanding, you have the opportunity to form a real relationship. That’s the kind of relationship you need to close a big deal before starting the long march through the ups and downs of a transformational project.
