Sales & Sales Management Brew

The dictionary defines Commitment as "to pledge as by a promise".  When we are looking for a prospects' ‘commitment to buy' what we are really testing is their commitment to invest to make a problem go away.  That commitment to invest, and the commitment to make a problem go away are validated when a prospect commits to make a decision.

Another way to look at this is described in Dave Kurlan's book, Baseline Selling.  Getting commitment to decide is analogous to ‘being at third base'.  In other words, prior to getting into a presentation mode, you must first make sure that your prospect has already made two of the three required decisions:

1. Do they have a problem and do they want to fix it?
2. Will they invest the time, money and resources to make the problem go away?

The third decision is - they have to decide.  Now that decision doesn't have to be a yes.  They just have to decide that when they see a presentation, that presentation either satisfies the requirements of solving the problem within the budget of time, money and resources, or it doesn't.  It is a simple yes or no. 

Now because most sales people try and ‘steal' third or skip third and just run home from first or second, these sales people will run into stalls, more questions and objections to buying at the time of presentation.  Following that type of process is far from effective.

If you want to close more business, more quickly and at higher margins make sure that before you start heading for home ‘to present', you have clearly identified the decision maker, the decision making process and that you have an agreement to make a decision, either yes or no, once you've presented.

On another day we'll talk about why you may find this difficult to do, but in the meantime, if you'd like to find out before I blog about it, click one of the following links:

Assessments

Sales Development

Which Test To Use