Quiz: Is This a Real Deal or No Deal?

SCENARIO: You've met with several customer executives. They've communicated to you that there's a general consensus within the firm that your offering would be useful for the company to own. You've offered to do an ROI to help them understand the potential impact. They told you this is not necessary because they see this as a strategic purchase.

CLICK for the correct answer »

The correct answer is: A NO-DEAL.
Companies almost never buy offerings that don't have a cost-benefit attached to them. Unless they are complete idiots, if they were serious about buying, they would jump at the chance to see an ROI analysis. The fact that they're not interested in seeing one shows that they're not really serious about buying and that whatever money is spent will be on other, higher-priority purchases.

According to sales guru Mark Sellers, author of the book "The Funnel Principle", it's always a mistake to spend too much time defining a solution until the prospect has actually decided to spend some money. And that's almost never the case unless the prospect has defined a specific financial impact for the problem being solved or opportunity being developed.

In other words, other than luxury perks for big company CEOs, very little in the B2B sales gets purchased simply because it's "strategic."

It's therefore a BIG mistake to pursue opportunities where no such impact has been, or can be, identified. Unless a prospect is willing to talk about the financial impact early in the sales cycle, there's a good chance you'll end up writing proposals for sales "opportunities" that aren't real, because the customer never intended to spend money on the problem.