Perpetual slip-pers: why do some deals never seem to close?

 A new financial year. A new pipeline.

Or are some hangovers from the Christmas period still loitering around?

Maybe even some perpetual “slip-pers”, also known as random deals left over from the summer months?

We’ve all had those opportunities when we are certain that our product is fantastic and offers huge benefits for everyone who will use it. 

So, why do some deals never seem to close? Why do our quarter deadlines come and pass, and these deals slip on?

Unfortunately, we see this situation regularly when working with sales teams. 

Fortunately, there are checks and balances we can implement to confirm that your optimism is well-placed and your deal has good foundations to forecast.

Typical issues with perpetual slip-pers

What is happening when yet another deadline has come and gone, and you still don’t have a signature on the dotted line? 

In our experience, it’s usually one of these three issues:

1. The pain that your customer is facing and that your solution solves has not been adequately identified, qualified and quantified.
2. The Metrics demonstrating to the customer how beneficial your solution will be to them are not big enough to prioritise your deal.
3. You have not correctly identified and built a Champion within the company who is invested in solving the problem you have identified.

From a MEDDIC perspective, these are issues with I (Identified pain), M (Metrics) and C (Champion), which puts this in the “early-stage sale pipeline issues” category of problems to fix. 

At the beginning of the sale cycle, the early stage of the pipeline, you will be: 

• Looking at Identified pain to assess whether you offer a solution that they are likely to want to assign budget to buy.
• Assigning numerical Metrics to both this pain and the impact of their buying your solution so you can demonstrate why they need your software.
• Identifying and building a Champion within the business who is invested to make the case for change on your behalf in the internal meetings that you will not be a part of.

A sale starts and ends with customer pain

As a rule, a sale begins and ends with customer pain (Identified pain). 

With pain comes motivation to act.

If the customer doesn’t have enough pain to seek a solution, no matter how much you know your solution will benefit them, they will not prioritise your deal. Instead, you will get the perpetual and dreaded “maybe”, seeing you waste precious time on a deal that will never close. 

Imagine a paper cut versus a leg amputation. Which one would spur you to seek help?

Properly qualifying the customer’s pain is vital to understanding whether you are really going to offer a solution that the customer both needs and wants to spend their budget on.

When deals slip, often sales reps have either guessed the pain, or have just not qualified enough that the pain is real and felt by those able to make the case for change.

The emotional elephant in the room

Before we go any further, let’s tackle the emotional elephant in the room.

We talked about deals closing, including your deal, which is close to closing. Yet, we have just said that the issues typically lie in early-stage pipeline challenges.

You’ll undoubtedly think, “But my deal is closing—it’s not in the early sales stages?”

Perhaps yes, perhaps no. 

Based on our experience with perpetual slippers, your odds are 50/50 unless you come back to the beginning and consider: is the foundation of your deal solid? 

Our advice to clients is always: “Save yourself some time and heartache and go back to the beginning to check those foundations.”

For any slipped deal, come back to the beginning:

• Have you validated the Identified pain?
• Do you have the Metrics to sufficiently back up a business case? 
• Do you have a Champion? Or have you just convinced yourself you are in good shape?

Start with requalification

When we deliver our MEDDIC sales training courses, we talk about the question: “So what?”

• Question 1: So what? What is the implication of pain you have identified? What happens if the customer does nothing?
• Question 2: So what? What is the implication of this implication? Is it a revenue issue or a risk issue? Dig deeper into the negative consequences of doing nothing.
• Question 3: So what? What is the implication of that? To whom and how bad?

Dig, dig, dig. Don’t guess. Use open questions to qualify.

As you can see from this example, one stage of qualifying the pain is not enough. Two stages get you a bit further, but only by really digging down will you find the real implications of their pain and be able to start collecting the right metrics to construct your business case. 

Note: Find a way to ask these questions in a more nuanced, subtle manner if you want to keep your relationship with the customer friendly. (One of our handy guides can help you with this.)

 You can collect the right metrics once you have identified and qualified:

• The pain the customer is feeling. 
• The implications of the pain. 
• Whose head the pain lands on. 

By doing this, you will demonstrate the value of your solution. 

Demonstrate the implication

Our second recommendation is to develop an ROI that demonstrates the potential loss of earnings, risk implications, or cost implications over the next year (or two).

Either way, once you have properly qualified the pain, you can properly quantify it with metrics in such a way that your customer will be much more likely to allocate budget to solving that risk. 

Identify your “Champion”

The third and most common issue we see in companies using the MEDDIC methodology is that you have not correctly identified their Champion within the customer’s business.

It’s a simple fact that a deal without a Champion will not close. 

There’s no getting around it. 

Rushing the process of identifying and (importantly) building your Champion will guarantee that the deal deadline will slip away time and time again. 

Champions are essential for customers to make the case for change. They are the person on the inside, fighting your corner in the meetings that you are not in, getting you access to the people in the organisation who will aid their cause and yours. 

Because a Champion is so important to your deal, be extra careful to qualify whether the person you think is your Champion actually is (read this article to find out if your Champion ticks all the boxes). Again, it’s very easy to persuade yourself that you have the right person because you want them to be, and you don’t want to admit that the time you have spent so far is wasted, but this is a classic sunk-cost fallacy.

Don’t fall for it.

Remember to build those foundations

Once you have addressed these three points, you’ll know where you stand. You can strike off your perpetual slip-per of a deal and stop wasting any more time on it, or it can be genuinely a deal that can go into your forecast with confidence. 

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