Avoiding the fob off

When I was a nipper, my sales team ran cold-call competitions a couple of weeks before Christmas.  It was called the Goose Fat week.  Whoever uncovered the most number of suspects won big, which meant finding people that planned to look into what we sold over the next twelve months to register a bona fide lead.  If we got a meeting for an immediate opportunity, that was worth double points.  I won in my first year, which paid for a flight I wanted to take, and I was highly motivated to win for free, being fresh out of Uni and brassick.

Yet a strange thing happened when I began to follow-up on all the people that’d said, “by all means call me in 3 months time”.  None of them were ready to meet me.  Had I just wasted all that effort and hope that’d gone before?  It was pretty disheartening.

My Boiler Roomers have encountered something similar of late.  People saying they like what they’ve got to say, and call back in ‘x’ months time.  Clearly, I’ve learned simply saying ‘thanks’ and moving on is not adequate in any way.

The approach that needs to be adopted here, is to say somehitng along the lines of:

‘that’s fine, glad you like what we can do for you, so as we don’t have to rely on my creaking memory when we next speak, what are you hoping will have happened between now and then, that would mean we can enthusiastically recommence our discussions?’

And unsurprisingly, they tend to umm and arh if they’re trying to fob you off, so it’s a lovely way of getting genuine progress, as depending on what they respond with, you can likely make a case for meeting up right away as what they think delays the process, actually has little to do with it.