Why Responding to Proposals you did not Influence is a bad idea
In sales we get the opportunity to learn lessons by making mistakes and those lessons usually serve us well through our careers.
Occasionally we get to learn the same lessons over again, either because it was so long since the last time it happened and we forgot, or maybe we moved into a new line of business and went along with the buyer's request, because we were learning the ropes in the new market.
In December, I received two proposal requests; an inbound lead and an inbound phone call from seemingly genuine and very nice people. I typically generate about 50 inbound leads per month, but these are not proposal requests, they are downloads of ebooks or whitepapers or webinar registrations.
I don't advocate salespeople selling complex B2B products sending proposals when they are solicited by prospective customers and they come out of the blue. Why?
But what if the buyer has been reading your blogs for a while and follows you on Twitter....what's wrong with sending a proposal?
To understand my reasoning on this point we need to take a closer look at how customers buy and I will use the IMPACT cycle from the book Why Killer Product's don't Sell, by Dominic Rowselll and Ian Gotts to illustrate this point.
