Selling – How to Make the Best Out of a Second Place Finish

If you sell something – a product, a service, yourself, whatever – there are inevitably going to be times when you lose to a competitor, your customer finds an alternative solution to his/her problem or he/she simply decides to do nothing. When your selling process doesn’t involve much direct contact with your customer (selling indirectly through dealers, distributors or VARs or directly via the Web) it’s difficult to determine if you’ve lost a deal because you were never interactively engaged in closing one. If you sell directly, though, the painful reality of the loss is not only immediately experienced, but is completely actionable.

More often than not, when a direct salesperson loses a deal, they quickly move onto the next deal, licking their wounds and fretting over the time they wasted on the lost sale. When they do this, they pass up on a huge opportunity for future sales to that “lost” customer. This opportunity presents itself because of a variety of reasons, but the two primary ones are:

Full Story: http://herman.org/Blogs/2-speed/archive/2006/08/04/230.aspx