Sandler Brief: A Decision to Not Make a Decision Is Still a Decision

While this idea of a decision not to make a decision may sound confusing to you the first time you encounter it, if you follow it through, you will find that it makes perfect sense. In fact, this simple Sandler guideline often serves as the last word when deciding whether you have a “live” prospect – or a “dead” lead.

Think of it this way...

You’ve worked hard to help your potential client identify and quantify pain in their world. Together, you’ve created the budget to make that pain disappear. This potential client has agreed up-front to make a decision once you presented your solution – but then avoided making a decision as they had originally promised, without explanation or insight.

What has this potential client told you about their level of commitment?

Either the prospect is willing to operate within the contract you have agreed to, or he or she is not. 

Either the prospect wants to support the business relationship you have spent your precious time, attention, and energy creating, or he or she does not. 

If the prospect chooses not to make a decision after having made a personal commitment to do so and won’t give you any information about why, that is a decision! It’s a decision not to work with you. 

And you know what? That’s okay. 

Understand what has happened and make a sound decision of your own: either (1) identify the roadblock or (2) move on and invest your time with another prospective buyer.

The one in our example is, for now, a dead lead. Could the opportunity come back to life? Maybe. Is that really what matters most right now? Is it possible that it’s more important that you stop anticipating income from this discussion . . . and start developing some other opportunity?

We can’t fool ourselves into thinking that a failure on the buyer’s side to make a decision is a good thing. We can’t tell ourselves that it’s simply a delay that we can wait out. We have to assume that it’s a bad thing unless we understand why the decision is being postponed and what, if anything, needs to happen for our sales process to move forward.

Sometimes, decisions are being made, but the buyer is just not telling us about those decisions. Sometimes there are internal obstacles to moving the sale forward, but we don’t know about them yet. And sometimes, the buyer has put the whole idea of buying anything from anyone on hold, but they’re too polite to tell us that.

In all these situations, we want to find out what’s happening. Our mindset should be, ‘Why can’t we make this decision? What’s going on to keep us from moving forward? Something is happening.’ If we can’t figure out what that something is, it’s a strategic mistake on our part to assume that everything is lined up for us—that the more time passes, the closer we will be to closing the deal. As a strategic and statistical reality, we must assume that the opposite is true.

Understanding your prospects this way is part of your job. If they don’t make a decision, and you can’t figure out why they won’t make a decision, you have to assume that they’ve decided not to work with you. Move on.