If You Feel It, Say It
I went to a sales training seminar this morning at a company called Peak Performance, located here in the Syracuse, NY area. I hadn’t been to a seminar in over a year, as I’d been out of town and on the go.
The speaker was talking about finding the pain of a prospect in general, but at one point he was telling us the story about a prospect that he’d made a proposal to. He’d spent a lot of time setting things up before the presentation, and had thought it was a done deal before, then after, he’d met the potential client. They called him a week later and said they were going to try to obtain a couple other proposals first before making a decision.
Instead of just accepting it at face value, he started asking some questions, and, because he wasn’t happy with what he “wasn’t” being told, he pulled the proposal. When the potential client began to stammer and say it was just how they did business, Rick, the speaker’s name, said that may be, but the proposal was for a specific time period, and he couldn’t guarantee his availability at any other time, so he’d rather pull the proposal and have them contact him again when they thought they might be ready, but that he couldn’t guarantee the same price at that time.
The thing that impressed me was his statement “if you feel it, say it”. Man, does that solve a lot of problems across the board! Of course, how you say it is another matter, but knowing what’s going on, or where things stand, is always better than sitting around worrying about it, or sitting around with this feeling that things are going well.
In business, and in my personal life, I know too many people who wonder the big “what if” about things that they actually have some control over. I do it myself, though not as much as I used to. When I’m in my groove, being proactive is how I keep myself at peace instead of worry. When I find myself slipping into that period of wondering where to go, I figure out a way to take the initiative.
It’s easy to slip into the waiting mode. Easy doesn’t always translate into fulfilling. If you know what’s going on, you can do something about it. If not,… well, who wants to deal with that all the time?
