HOURS OF PRODUCTIVITY CAN BE RECOUPED BY EMBRACING THE WORD "NO"

One of the things I enjoy about what I do is the variety of people I get to observe doing their work across a range of verticals and locales. While on the one hand many of these people are in sales, their buyers are in so many different categories. After years of watching and learning, I have come to the conclusion that if business people would get comfortable with and adopt one word, they, their companies, their entire ecosystems, and by extension the world, could become measurably more productive, and probably happier.

Contrary to what some may be thinking, the word, and more importantly the outcomes it delivers is not big, uncommon, academic, or any of the sort. It is a small two letter word that packs a big message. The word is NO!

I truly believe that if buyers, sellers, and almost everyone in business would just embrace the word, and say it when they know they should, millions of dollars would not be squandered, hours of productivity can be recouped or redirected towards better use.

Looking at prospects who say things like call me back, or send me some info, or any of the common euphemisms for no I dont want that. By using this cop out, they all but assure that they will be interrupted again, no matter how skillfully they think they can use voice mail. Whats funny is the second call, because they finally say what they should have said on the first call, or they come up with another line. Either way they have wasted some of their time, and while not as important, some of the sellers time. In the process creating a stalker, because they gave the seller a whiff of a possibility instead of just doing what Nancy said, Just Say No.

Sales people are no better, they cant say no to prospects, clients, or their peers. Imagine how much more money they would make if they just said no when colleagues ask them to grab a coffee, do this, or help with the football pool, or any of the things that regularly take sales people away from their task, or even just break their concentration or flow. They should say no to buyers making unreasonable demands that not only limit profitability, but waste the most precious of all resources, time. The effort required to negotiate internally to deliver something they should have said no to, is at times greater the effort required to go out a find a better prospect.

Of course the biggest enabler to enabling a sales person to say no, is a healthy pipeline. If you know you had enough, or more than enough viable prospects in your pipe, you would say no to silly demands, you would not pin hopes in empty promises like please send me some info. No, you would see it and call it for what it is.

The biggest no sellers can learn to say, is to that voice inside that beckons you to see things that are not there, ignore the brightest red flags, and to pretend that even when the buyer does not use the word, he clearly means no!