Why Do Sales Teams LOSE? – Lack of Responsiveness (7-10)

As mentioned, I’m going to present reasons why companies win and lose sales deals. These reasons were outlined by Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, in a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

This article was written to help answer the ultimate sales question, “How can we win a lot more deals?” In order to find the answer, Ron started by addressing the questions, “Why do we win and why do we lose?” Each of these points were taken from a library of thousands of win loss sales debriefs and compiled into performance rankings.

7. Take your time responding to requests.

One of the surprises of this study’s findings was the fact that many of the criteria associated with Strategic Account Managers (SAMs) (such as responsiveness, the relationship with the account team and presentation) showed negative gaps. From these findings, it appears as if the best account managers often go unnoticed, whereas any negative behavior in the sales process is remembered by the potential customer. Nowhere is this more evident than in responsiveness. Very few respondents mentioned the responsiveness of the SAM as a reason for selecting a supplier. Problems with responsiveness, however, were noticed and mentioned as a primary reason for eliminating a supplier from the evaluation process. An example of how to create a negative impression was provided by a respondent, who explained:

“[Company 1] was slow in getting around to pricing. The people that put on the presentation basically said, ’We will have to get back to you on that,’ and they never got back to us on that. It seemed very lethargic about getting back to us and getting us figures. It was like it was saying, ‘Let us go back and sharpen our pencils some more and take another two or three weeks.’”

The issue of responsiveness seems to be like a car engine: you don’t notice how it is performing until something goes wrong. A lack of responsiveness could quickly erode any sort of relationship that has been carefully built, regardless of other factors. Customers want to receive value sooner rather than later, and if the customer experiences responsiveness problems during the evaluation process, it can indicate that there may be problems with the supplier later in the relationship.