No Sale + Excuse ≠ Sale

In my career I’ve heard all sorts of excuses why salesguys have not done something. It never got any less annoying. Just about every time, they expected to hear ‘oh, that’s alright then.’ Rubbish. It happens less to me now, but when it did in the past, I always used to keep quiet, walk over to a flip-chart, or pull out a blank sheet of paper, and write the simple equation:

No Sale + Excuse ≠ Sale

It tended to have the desired impact.