Why Disappointed Prospects Don’t Switch to Your Company

By Dave Kurlan

You just had the call.

Twenty minutes of the prospect telling you what the incumbent got wrong. Late shipments. A rep who went missing. Invoices that needed a decoder ring. You are already thinking about how easy this will be. They asked for a proposal and because you are so confident, you send it.

You make 12 follow-up attempts over the next 4 weeks before reaching them. Then they say the sentence that ends this opportunity.

“We’re going to give them one more chance.”

One more chance. After they spent the first meeting building your case for you.

If that feels unfair, it is. It is also predictable. Most salespeople never ask the question that would have told them this was coming.

There are two kinds of buyers with your proposal in their inbox.

The first kind is loyal to the letter. Not your letter. Theirs. The vendor they have always used. The rep they have lunch with from time to time. Disappointment does not move them, because they have normalized disappointment and it doesn’t affect how they decide. Loyalty is how they decide. They will complain about the incumbent the way a fan complains about their favorite team and then renews the season tickets. You heard a buying signal. They were venting on the way back to their box seat.

The second kind of buyer keeps score. They will leave an incumbent. And they will leave you, too. Not because somebody showed up with a lower price, but because the score of what you fixed, and what you ignored, told them you were losing. These are the customers you lose and cannot explain, because you thought happy meant mistake-free. It does not.

Happy shows up after something breaks and you fix it fast enough that they know you have their back. I wrote about this a couple of years ago from the customer-service side. The sales side is worse. When nothing goes wrong, you never get the chance to prove you have their back. A competitor does not have to be better. They only have to show up during a stretch when you were invisible.

So when a customer leaves you for a lower price, do not file them under “thinker who saw through us.” Some of them did the math, and you never put your math on the table. Some of them are loyal to cheap. Those are not the same loss, and the fix is not the same fix. A thinker does not leave a vendor who has their back for a smaller invoice. A price loyalist does. If you cannot tell those two apart, you will try to save both with a discount, and you will be wrong twice.

The prospects you cannot pry loose are the letter-loyal ones. Read 10 Reasons Why You Can’t Outsell an Incumbent. That is not a character flaw. You want your own customers to be that loyal. The mistake is treating a Yankees fan as someone you can turn into a Red Sox fan. That is next to impossible.

Four questions separate a real opportunity from a fan who roots for the laundry over the players wearing it this year. Most salespeople ask none of them.

Ask about the loyalty. “You’ve been with them a long time. What would it take for you to leave?” If the answer is a shrug, or a speech about the relationship, you are not in a sales cycle. You are on the outside looking in.

Ask about the commitment to change. “You sound like you’ve had it up to here. How committed are you to making a change?” If you get a feeling back, pretty committed, a seven, ask what that commitment is worth in dollars if nothing has changed in six months. A prospect who cannot answer that is not committed. They are only uncomfortable, and uncomfortable renews.

Ask what a switch to you would require, not what they liked about the demo. “If you did leave them, what would we have to prove before you moved the business?” If they cannot say it, you are inventing the reasons, and then losing to criteria you did not know existed.

Then ask the question almost nobody asks, because it feels like you are helping the other guy.

“What happens if they call you next week, apologize, and promise it will not happen again?”

Watch the face.

The letter-loyal prospect relaxes. That is the answer you needed. They were waiting for permission to stay. You can still try to sell them. You should stop forecasting a win. An apology from the incumbent is not a threat to your proposal. It is the reset button on their loyalty, and you just found out the button works.

The scorekeeper answers differently. “They have apologized before. I am done.” Now you have something you can run with. Get the history of the apologies. Get what “done” means in dollars and a timeline. Then, and only then, is there a real opportunity instead of a feeling.

That is the whole problem with the ones you feel good about and do not close. A lot of them were letter-loyal prospects who were good at complaining. Using feelings about a sales opportunity as a dashboard gauge is like using your gas gauge as a compass. The tank can be full and you can still be pointed the wrong way. That is why feelings do not belong in a pipeline. “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Here is the part that stings. You assume they decide the way you do. If you would leave a vendor who disappointed you, you hear disappointment and assume a switch is imminent. If you are loyal to the people who take care of you, you assume your own customers will be too, and you skip the proof. Both assumptions are wrong often enough to wreck your forecasts. Your win rate does not jump because you had a realization. It moves because you stop treating prospects loyal to the incumbent as qualified opportunities, and you spend your time on the ones who answered the apology question with “I am done.”

Objective Management Group’s latest data, from the assessments of more than 2.5 million salespeople, shows that only 13% of all salespeople have supportive sales beliefs. While 77% of the top salespeople have supportive selling beliefs, 0% of the bottom 10%, and just 3% of the bottom half, do. Non-supportive beliefs are the biggest stakeholder in Sales DNA. A salesperson who assumes prospects decide the way that salesperson decides will not ask the apology question. They already know the answer, and they are wrong. Read The Best Salespeople Are 27 Times as Likely to Have This

A Sales Team Evaluation will show you the self-limiting beliefs on the team, and the gaps across all 21 Sales Core Competencies. Training and coaching on process, methodology, strategy, and tactics is still the right work. If the beliefs do not get reprogrammed as part of that work, the new questions die in the car on the way to the call.