- May 9, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Each year I eagerly await May 11th. While May 11th of 2025 is an important because it is Mother’s Day, most years, May 11 is the day that the new leaves are finally on the trees (based on my observations since 1988).
Last year the early spring months were very cool, and the leaves were a week late. This year, the early spring months were warmer and the leaves were on the trees a week early.
The timing of the full-sized leaves on the trees is also a very powerful analogy to sales and closing.
Most salespeople reach the end of their pitch and assume that it’s time to propose and close. But just because they reached “the end” doesn’t mean their prospect has arrived at the same place at the same time. Some prospects get there earlier and salespeople miss the signs. From that point forward, every word can potentially help to unsell the prospect. Could anything positive possibly happen from that?
While much less likely, the timing problem can occur even in a well-structured, customized, staged, milestone-centric, buyer-focused, and optimized sales process such as Baseline Selling. While the process includes a milestone to identify the timing of the purchase, shit happens. Collecting proposals, and inviting competitors to present can delay the process, while involving additional stakeholders can also cause delays.
Timelines can also move up. If the salesperson is with the actual decision maker(s), and the compelling reason to buy creates enough urgency, the decision maker may very well short-circuit their entire buying process, skip the meetings, consultations, committees, competitors, and proposals, and simply buy to get their problem solved. How do you eliminate your competition? Make yourself and your company the obvious choice – a no brainer – and remove your competition from consideration. We teach sales teams how to execute their sales process so as to achieve this very outcome.
Children learn to walk, talk, be potty-trained and ride bicycles at different ages. Sometimes the gap can be years! Similarly, there may also be significant gaps in when salespeople and prospects arrive at decision-making moments. When you consider how frequently prospects need to think about it, talk with others, collect more proposals, find the money, take care of more important things first, or budget for it, it’s pretty clear that in most cases, salespeople are the first – and only ones – to arrive at decision-making moments.
Around 35 years ago, I named one of the 21 Sales Core Competencies, “Supportive Buy Cycle TM.” Buy Cycle represents how a salesperson makes a major purchase and there is a nearly mirror-image correlation between how salespeople buy, and what they expect their prospects to do. One of the five attributes in the Buy Cycle competency is Decision Making, whether the salesperson makes a decision or thinks it over at decision making time.
If you are a company whose model calls for a one-call close, you want salespeople with the Decision-Making attribute as a strength. They make decisions and therefore expect their prospects to make decisions. They are much more likely to overcome a put-off than a salesperson who thinks things over and will understand when a prospect wants to think things over.
On the other hand, if your sales process routinely has salespeople arriving at decision time well ahead of their prospects, then handling objections, and not taking think-it-overs, is counter-productive, and the prospect will feel pressured and annoyed. I prefer salespeople who are decision makers, but in order to prevent uncomfortable situations such as the one I just described, we must train salespeople to get the timing right.
Dinger, my dog, asks for dinner each day at 5:08pm. (Article about Dinger and his listening skills) It got to the point that if I say, “Oh, is it 5:08?” he goes to his bowl and sits and waits for the food. On the other hand, I’m always hungry, but it’s not appropriate to seek out lunch at 10am, or to ask for dinner at 3pm and again at 9pm. I can’t ask just because I’m prematurely hungry. There are other people to consider, especially my wife, who does the meal prep and cooking, and the rest of the family, who have an appropriate alignment between hunger and meal time.
There are many important milestones to a sales process and some of those milestones are very predictive of whether you will win or lose a deal or account. One of those milestone is timing, and while that may not be predictive of a win, if you get the timing wrong, you are likely to find yourself on the wrong end of a decision. They say that timing is everything. It’s true, and everything you do correctly in the sales process can be undermined by bad timing.