Five Sure-Fire Ways to Lose the Business

If you sell to corporations, chances are you sell to middle managers. While it may be true their boss signs the contract and gets the fancy lunch, it’s generally the middle manager who quietly gets you the gig and manages the overall project. So knowing this, why do so many pitches that start out well end so badly? In my experience, it comes down to five really dumb things that companies do to tick off the guy who is supposed to be getting you the work.

1. Do an End Run: Is your contact a little slow in returning a call? Are you pretty sure your contact is actually just an influencer, not the decision maker? Are you resenting having to go through multiple layers of middle managers? Then what you need is an end run to the big guy.  It’s not too hard; a little Google searching or time on LinkedIn should produce at least the name and title of the big kahuna. You can probably work out their email from the syntax of your contact. So go ahead and send your proposal over the head of your contact to his or her boss. They’ll just love that! Because you’ve now made their decision much, much easier. They won’t ever want to do business with you. Not ever. So if things work out, they will be irritated and then they’ll scratch you off the list of things to read, respond to or deal with and quietly file you under Revenge – Future-Pending. If you’re lucky enough to actually get somewhere with your end run, your middle manager friend will be more than pleased to ensure you get little work, late payment, and tossed off the project just as soon as possible.

2. Stalk Your Champion: After you’ve received some encouraging sign like a promise to read a proposal or take a project to the next level, it’s important to ensure failure by relentlessly stalking the person you are counting on to get you the work. Start with two or three emails a day. Nice, curt ones that express how mystified you are that they haven’t set aside everything else to return your call. If they go unanswered or with vague responses, begin calling. See if you can find their cell phone and target them at 8am or 6pm when they are trapped in their car. If that doesn’t work, call their office, zero out to the operator and have them paged. Or try one-two punch of death which involves stalking for a week or two and then sending an end run email to your victim’s boss expressing your exasperation with the lack of response. For a great article on why someone may not be calling you back, I recommend this piece by Peter Bregman posted a while ago at Harvard Business Review.

3. Act Really, Really Desperate. Nothing succeeds in corporate life like a pity party!  Be sure to keep lowering your price as you raise the aggressive tone in your communications. Your contact will see that you will probably take a job at Arby’s if this contract doesn’t come through. And, being a good person, they will briefly consider laying their careers on the line to bring you onboard because you’re just that special. Then they’ll move on.

4. Play Hard-to-Get: If desperate isn’t your style, make it difficult to schedule meetings and presentations. Ask for extra time past the proposal deadline because you’re just too busy helping your customer in Singapore with a huge project. Make your assistant call every other day to change appointment times or set up and cancel conference calls. Your contact will be very impressed with how busy and successful your firm has become. They will never wonder if you have the resources or even the interest in their business, and they won’t mind a bit rescheduling you over and over with multiple people in their organization because hey, they’re all just sitting around waiting for you turn up to the party.

5. Waste Time. The middle managers who take you in front of their boss or even their boss’s boss will just love it when you show up late, spend twenty minutes getting your projector to work, and gush like a pre-teen girl about the opportunity to do business with your company. Don’t forget to name drop, run past your allotted time and ask questions that demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge about the company you are pitching.

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams,
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter