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Let Me Know if Anything Changes
By DeJuan Brown
DeJuan Brown cut his teeth in sales at Intuit and currently serves a team as a Regional Sales Manager at Bloomberg BNA. DeJuan was featured in Episode 6 (top1.fm/6). He and his wife are the parents of six kids and DeJuan also contributed two other stories to Volume 1 of Sales Success Stories: Why is Why Better Than What and The Janitor Know More Than You
Losing a sale can be devastating, no matter the size of the deal.
I mean the time, effort, and energy we expend to get to the finish line is real.
To get all the way there and not get the deal across impacts so many areas of our lives.
I believe there is a specific type of fatigue that stems from hearing ‘thanks for all your time, but we’ve decided to go another route.’
Several years into my career, my final responses to this rebuff were almost always identical.
I’d often ask the normal, “What made you decide to go that route?” and then finally I’d muster up the strength to utter the dreaded 8-word cliché:
“No problem, let me know if anything changes.”
In 5+ years, amazingly, nothing ever changed! At least, not enough changed to prompt a prospect to call me back.
Honestly, I never thought twice about whether my statement would ever even garner a future response.
I was on auto-response when the deal was lost, and being that disconnected from the prospect at the end probably meant that I was disconnected from the beginning.
It wasn’t until I started hearing talk about concepts like servant-leadership, service first and customer-centrism that I had an epiphany of some sort.
Well, it was not the kind of epiphany that leads to wholesale change. However, I had enough interest to try some short-term experimentation with these concepts.
The first thing I tried ended up being a game-changer, and I can point to at least three consistent results which persist to this day.
Instead of the dismissive and uncaring “let me know if anything changes,” I shifted my focus to what I term the “continuity of service.”
I would make helping my prospect my primary goal in my sales meetings. I know many of you are thinking, “DUH!!! What other goals would you have?”
If I’m honest, I had a ton of goals in my meetings during that time. However, at least 90% were singular and self-serving. I wanted the prospect to know all the things my solution could do for them, how long we’d taken to develop these unique features, what other clients were saying about our solution, etc.
Even my discovery process was about “me” and “us”; it was rarely about “them.”
‘Continuity of service’ implied that service had a starting point, but no end. This was the thought that changed the tide.
Listen, I wish I could tell you that I immediately went from 0-100, and I tripled my sales THAT year. It definitely didn’t happen that way, so here’s the deal.
What changed was my mindset, and therefore my language. Mentally, I went into meetings with the question, “What does service look like for this prospect?”
This question alone meant that I had to ask different questions, listen more completely (complete listening is something I’ll address later), and develop a creativity that, up until this point, I’d lacked.
Losing a deal took on an entirely different meaning to me, as I began to think of the loss as yet another opportunity – not a lost opportunity, but an opportunity. My prospect-facing statement of ‘let me know if anything changes,’ morphed into the internal question. “How can I bring value to this prospect from this point until they either become a client or a source of clients in the future?”
Exchanging one dismissive statement for a veiled call to action, I began to get traction.
Initially, I was deathly afraid that telling folks to use me as a resource would result in a time suck with no real returns attached.
What if every prospect tried to use me for free information, free access to software, or something of the sort? How could I manage requests coming in from every angle while still trying to do my job?
Years later, I’ve not had such an occurrence and I’ve seen great results to boot.
Specificity has been key, however. I found that saying, “I’d love it if you’d use me as a resource” alone would leave the prospect without guidance on what that even means.
Once I started unpacking that for them, people would actually take me up on it, see the value in my service and solution, and several times they would boomerang to become clients.
Here’s a real and practical example:
After several meetings and a couple of demos, I met with the VP of Tax at a large corporation. I was hoping to get the contract signed that day. All the I’s had been dotted and T’s crossed, at least in my estimation.
Upon my arrival, we exchange pleasantries and everything was going smoothly. In the midst of this, I state that based on our prior meetings, it seemed natural that we move forward unless there were other questions that had come up.
He looked at me and started, “Well…..” Immediately I thought “Houston, we have a problem.”
The VP began to explain to me his rationale for continuing with their current solution for another year. I let him know the reasons for my disagreement, reiterated to him the value that we’d uncovered during our times together, and ended with the unpacking I referred to earlier.
“I’d love it if you’d use me as a resource. Your team told me that comparative content between the 37 states you do business in is near-impossible to collect efficiently. Based on that, I want to serve you all. I’ll send this to the team also, but please let me know when a project requires such a comparative. I’m more than happy to create that chart in real time and send it to you all.
I know that you also periodically deliver time-specific reports to the CFO around developments in the foreign countries you all have interests in. Let me help you there as well. Prior to your next CFO roundtable, let me know the date range you’re presenting on, and which jurisdictions you’re presenting in. I’ll help supplem...
