When do I let go of a prospect?

Once again, Tuesday’s Lunch Q&A was a successful and, dare I say, profitable event for the people who attended.

To give you an example of the kind of issues we discuss each week, I’ve picked out one of the top questions of the day. It was asked by Pierre from Canada, who wanted to know:

“When I’m making my prospecting calls, when do I let go of a person who keeps saying they’re not interested?”

You must remember a couple of important things.

• Selling is about odds. What are the odds of turning around someone, on the phone, who’s not interested vs. the odds of obtaining an appointment from the next person you call? Most people can tell you a success story about the time they turned around a prospect who kept saying “I’m not interested.” But they seem to forget the hundreds of times they hung up the phone cursing in total frustration.
• If 1 out of every 10 to 15 dials of the phone results in an appointment, why would you ever want to argue with someone who’s saying “Not interested?” Just politely say, “Thank you very much, have a good day,” and move on. All the time you waste arguing with someone who is saying, “No,” is time lost when you could have moved on to the next person and possibly have found a “Yes.” If you realize that each dial of the phone makes you money, it’s important to maximize the amount of dials you make.
• “No” today only means “No” today, not tomorrow, next week or next year. Just because somebody tells you they’re not interested doesn’t mean you can’t call them again. How do you know you didn’t happen to get them on a bad day? Or, maybe in a couple of weeks their situation might change and they’ll be interested in what you have to offer. Besides, do you really think they’re going to remember that you called? I know we all think we’re memorable, but none of us is really that memorable. In fact, I’ll bet that everyone reading this can tell me about numerous clients who originally said “Not interested,” but because of your persistence, they came aboard.