Imagine that you own and operate a nice restaurant. How would you feel if you took reservations from 100 folks for an evening of dining and had the following experience?
On the strength of these reservations, you ordered and purchased food and beverages for 100 people, prepped the ingredients, cooked, plated and served the meals, poured drinks, and finally cleared the dishes, and cleaned up the tables and the kitchen afterwards. You employed and paid a dozen staff, including your chef, kitchen and busser staff, host, waiters, and bartender for a full day’s work.
Sadly, 45 of the 100 expected guests never showed!
You invested in purchasing, preparing, serving, and cleaning-up for nearly half of the restaurant’s seating that didn’t show up. How would you feel?
Surprisingly, this is status quo for sales! Typical B2B software vendors suffer from an average 45% No Decision rate. That’s right: ~45% of all deals forecasted to close end in a No Decision outcomes.
(A No Decision outcome is generally defined as an opportunity forecasted to close that is not won by the vendor nor lost to a competitor, but where the prospect chooses to do nothing. Also known as “Do Nothing” or “Status Quo”, and often evidenced by opportunities that just “roll-over” to the next quarter – quarter after quarter!)
How often do you execute an entire sales cycle only to have the prospect do nothing, yielding a No Decision outcome? Contemplate the effort that went into these opportunities: qualification calls, overview demos, discovery conversations, deeper demos, POCs, proposals, and perhaps even more. It’s like all that work purchasing, preparing and serving dinners to a pile of restaurant “no shows”.
No Decision rates represent one of the biggest “knobs” in terms of improving sales productivity, yet very few vendors take action to improve their numbers. Consider: If you have ten salespeople and you reduce your No Decision rate by 10%, you just gained a “free” salesperson and the incremental revenue they generate!
Solution? The Doing Discovery book and Workshops detail three objective parameters that you can use to identify and address No Decision sales opportunities.
What’s your current No Decision rate? What would you like it to be?
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