Have you fired any prospects lately?

The sales rep, who had been on my team for a relatively short period of time, was anxious to discuss one of his pipeline deals with me. He was concerned about how to move the deal forward, and as he explained all the circumstances and dynamics of the deal to me, I realized that I was hearing the description of an unqualified prospect and an unwinnable deal. When he finished explaining the situation to me, I said, “I think you should fire them.” There was a long pause at the other end of the phone. “What do you mean?” asked the rep. “I think you should fire them; I think you should get out of this deal.” There was an even longer pause. Then, the rep asked hesitantly, “We can do that here?”

If this rep had been in his first sales role, or perhaps newly promoted from a BDR role, his question wouldn’t have been as memorable. But it stuck in my mind because he was a successful, mid-career sales professional, in his third or fourth role as an account executive…. which meant that no one, no manager or executive with whom he had worked previously, had ever empowered him to get out of an unwinnable deal.

There is a pernicous myth in the sales profession that a great rep is one who can take a poorly qualified lead and develop it into a great opportunity. The truth is not that great reps turn poor leads into great deals; the truth is that great reps are those sales professionals who disqualify poor leads as quickly as possible, spend an absolute minimum of time and effort on them, and redirect that time into opportunities with prospects who are a good fit and well-qualified.

When a sales rep goes into an engagement thinking of ‘selling,’ rather than of determining whether there is a good fit between her product and company and the prospect’s business needs, three different things occur, none of which are good. First, the ‘selling’ mindset causes the rep to do a poor job of discovery. You can understand a prospect and their needs only when you go into the dialogue with the question, ‘Is this prospect a good fit for us, and are we a good fit for them?’ foremost in your mind. But you can only go into an engagement looking for potential ‘fit’ when you acknowledge that the answer might be ‘no’ - in other words, when you are fully prepared to disengage from this particular sales opportunity. No willingness to walk away from the deal means that you don’t think primarily of whether there is a good fit, which means in turn that you don’t conduct a good discovery.

Second, the sales professional’s stature is lowered and the relationship between sales rep and prospective customer becomes unhealthy. If the sales rep isn’t empowered to walk away from opportunities that aren’t qualified, then he becomes something other than a business professional . If sales isn’t about determining and arriving at a mutually beneficial business solution, then it is about manipulation and power dynamics. When both the prospect and the sales rep acknowledge that they’re working together to determine whether there is a good fit (and that either or both of them may determine there isn’t and disengage), then their status is equal, and their relationship is healthier.

Third, when a sales rep isn’t empowered to walk away from deals, she is going to waste a lot of time and mental energy. How many countless hours, how much emotional and intellectual energy, have been burnt up on fruitless efforts, chasing deals that were ultimately a waste of all that time and effort? Let your competitor expend all of those resources on opportunities that won’t produce revenue, while you spend your time and effort on opportunities that retire quota and grow company revenues.

Using the phrase, ‘firing the prospect’ may seem unnecessarily harsh or aggressive to some. But the reason I use it is because it is empowering to sales reps, far too many of whom labor under the oppressive mindset that ‘every deal must be won.’ A rep freed from this mentality is a rep whose stature is raised, a rep who focuses on thorough and detailed discovery, and a rep who is empowered to focus on business opportunities that matter.