When you’re in the business of providing services, the mutual respect between provider and client is everything. At A Sales Growth Company we pride ourselves on being flexible, innovative, nimble, and decisive in our approach. It’s how we get things done and deliver value to our clients.
But, every now and again we encounter situations where we’ve got to pick and choose our battles. A couple years ago a potential client expressed interest in our services, but our standard pricing and approach didn’t quite fit their needs or budget at the time. Wanting to help, we created a slightly different offer – a scaled-down version of an existing package – that we believed would deliver the value they needed.
What followed was an extraordinarily complex due diligence process that included an hour of free consultation, where we provided tremendous insights into their business and areas of focus. We gave them access to one of our existing clients, who provided a great referral and shared their experience working with us.
Despite all these efforts to make this work and the value we’d already provided, this prospect kept making demands – more client referrals, more concessions, and an increasingly complicated process. It became clear that they were becoming too difficult to work with.
Sales Process Red Flags
Every client journey will be different but if you come across any of these scenarios, listen to the alarm bells that might start sounding. Any of these red flags could indicate a prospect you want to walk away from.
Overly Complex Due Diligence
Due diligence is necessary, we get it, but if a prospect’s process starts to feel more intensive than most be careful. Despite our efforts to accommodate them, there was always another hoop to jump through.
Excessive Demands
We gave them our time, our effort, and what we perceived as a significant amount of value. Yet, the demands kept coming. More client references, more changes to this and that, more concessions, more of our time and resources without any form of commitment on their part.
Indecisiveness
We tried to tailor something that fit their scope and budget, but they still wavered. This indecisiveness and their demands made it too difficult to move forward with any sort of confidence.
None of these may be deal breakers on their own, but when they start to pile up it becomes clear that this client will become a nightmare in the future.
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