7 Stages of Client Commitment

1. Prospect Attention - Capturing the prospect's attention happens when you successfully
cold call, network, or respond to an inbound lead by making contact with an appropriate
prospect who has economic approval to buy.

2. Prospect Disbelief - Prospects automatically tend to disbelieve you on the first pass for
the simple reason you're a salesperson. Use your knowledge of their business model and
business pain to break through their disbelief filter and "prove" that you sell your
offerings as a business tool which can help their business.

3. Prospect Value Identification - Based on your firm's unique sales value proposition,
you must position yourself and your firm differently from your competition and get the
prospect to verbalize the difference.

4. Prospect Action Step Commitment - To sell more prospects, you need to drive them to
make "action step" commitments not "verbal" commitments. Has a prospect ever told you
"we are going to sign the Purchase Order in December" and then not respond to any of
your calls or email inquiries until April of the next year? Prospects need to show action
steps that move your sales cycle forward to prove you should spend time with them.

5. Prospect Time Management Commitment - To close deals, management must commit

their time for your product or service review, demo's, executive briefing, and contract
negotiations. If you have a prospect who will not commitment their time, then they are
not ready to buy.

6. Prospect Financial Commitment - There is an old Sicilian saying that my grandfather

(a successful entrepreneur) use to say "No money? Call me when you have a nickel in
your pocket." Spending too much time on a prospect because they "should" buy or "will"
buy sometime in the future will not help you hit your sales quota (or target) now.
Prospects must make a financial commitment by giving you their budget or confirming
your investment is affordable, otherwise you are just making friends - not customers.

7. Prospect Decision Commitment - The goal of every sales cycle is decision

commitment. It's one thing to take a prospect through 6 steps and at Step 7, they buy from
someone else. It's another for the prospect to decide NOT to buy from you or your
competitors. You must force prospects to make a decision or else you are wasting your
time with professional lookers.

Prospects must prove they are buyers through commitments . . . not just words.

Many salespeople "project" these steps as being completed before they have actually happened
and end up incorrectly making an assumption that the prospect is going to buy.

Once you have networked or cold called your way into the beginning of your sales cycle with a
prospect and established there is a business need for your product or service, give them a "Client
Briefing Document" (after Stage 3) as a preliminary sales tool. It is a quick way to establish and
manage prospect commitments.

A Client Briefing Document is a written outline of the expected sequence steps for your firm to
sell and the prospect to buy. It should include dates, action steps, and timelines for each part of
the sales cycle needed for the sales transaction to be completed from your end including
forecasted time for product or service review, contract negotiations, etc. In short, it lists each step
so both the vendor and the buyer know what is expected.

In sales, this is a tool called an anthropomorphism.

Anthropomorphisms assign human characteristics or actions to be taken by non-human things

like the theory of sales steps.

By listing human steps in a Client Briefing Document, you can gently "push" the prospect
through the 7 steps of commitment.

Use a Client Briefing Document to

manage prospect commitments.

Remember, the faster you premeditatively manage sales commitments by prospects, the shorter
your sales cycle will be.

"It is not what they say they're going to buy that's important - it's what they buy that
counts." Anonymous