A few years ago, I was at a business exhibition where I met an ex-colleague. We had worked together about 10 years previously and not seen each other in the intervening years.
After exchanging the obvious “fancy meeting you here” and “what have you been doing all these years” comments, we discussed what we were currently doing.
I had been running my sales training company for a few years and was, as ever, on the look out for more customers.
She was now the CEO of a small services company but then, of course, I already knew that! I had done my home work! I knew which companies were going to be exhibiting, I knew which ones I wanted to talk to and I knew who I wanted to talk to within those companies.
Thanks to her position, she was one of the people that I most wanted to talk to at the exhibition.
So, we talked about our current roles and I explained how I helped sales people to be more effective in their roles; something that she was very interested in. I asked her “If you had a magic wand, what would you wish for your sales team?”
Her sales team was quite young and inexperienced and tended to chase every opportunity and customer with the same gusto, never really stopping to determine if they were worth the time. This is something that I encounter a lot of the time so we discussed the problem and possible solutions.
At this point, she needed to get back to her stand and talk to her customers. After all, that was why she was there. We agreed that there was merit in taking the conversation further and agreed to talk the following week. We arranged a call for the following week, continued our discussions and tentatively agreed an approach to solving them.
So far, all was going well. I had engaged with the budget holder / decision maker; I had understood their problem; I had demonstrated that I could deliver a valuable product to help to solve their problem. I could not have done anything more to win the deal. “Its in the bag” I thought.
Wrong!
I followed up our conversation about a week later with an email and instantly got an “Out of Office”. “That’s a bit inconvenient” I thought before reading it. It was more than inconvenient. The Out of Office essentially stated “I have left the company”.
I didn’t see that coming and, as I understand it, neither did she! The senior management of the company had all been asked to leave and all of a sudden, training for the sales team was not a priority.
It took me about three years to wait for a new management team to be established, build some rapport with them and rekindle my opportunity. Only then did I manage to sell and deliver some training to them.
Looking back, I still do not think that there was anything that I could have done to change what happened. I was working with the CEO, understood their pain and knew what to deliver. However, you can never be sure of a deal until it is signed by both sides and you can lose a deal despite doing everything correctly.