Fantasy Brexit Chasing Rainbows Stop The Clock

This post features three phrases I’ve heard over the past week around Friday gone’s one-time EU/UK B-Day for its title.

Each has its own interesting sales objection and their prevention parallel.

Fantasy Brexit refers to the fact that the UK’s lawmakers are failing to coalesce around an acceptable future relationship declaration. Specifically, that many ask for a flavour which has already been ruled out by Brussels.

What happens when your prospect demands that which cannot be delivered? Usually this occurs with thinking they want something way beyond resource constraints, from manpower to budget. It’d certainly test your true relationship status should you be able to conduct a Fantasy Spec exercise. Can you isolate the Unicorns?

Chasing Rainbows chides those seeking an impossible outcome. A slight nuance on the above, in that the focus is on the unreachable horizon.

Who will only sign-up if there’s a 1000% return by year-end? Or switch only if there’s a monumental pricetag difference? Or expect compensation in the light of a gap between claims and results even if totally outside your control? With the closer harmony between Op Ex and Cap Ex these days, on-demand, pay-as-used pricing allows purchasing to be readily set against ever more daily gains. Still, we need to show sometimes that our pot o’ gold of whatever size brings plenty of associated joys.

Stop The Clock is an urgency killer. I recently blogged on the deadline effect. Yet what happens when such seemingly immovable wall ends up being wholly flexible and eminently porous?

We’ve all suffered it. The ‘end-of-period’ discount fails to work its magic. The here-and-now, this-time-only, boy-how-I-begged-the-boss price reduction that produces no prospect commitment your way. What to do when the same offer is insisted upon later?

Determining how malleable timelines are in reality is an essential solution selling skill. Perhaps identifying why and when urgency pulls its most deadly of levers is one of the defining traits of Sales success.

Being alert to under what circumstances your prospect might stop the clock and who can put their fingers on said hands can take you far.