Episode #275: Pour On The Value

In the profession of sales, “We Don’t Have Any Budget” is one of the most widespread pushbacks from buyers to our sterling offer. It also a false flag as well. We should never believe it when we hear this, because they certainly have budget. What they really mean is they are not prepared to allocate any of their budget for this product or service. If we fully believe that what we are selling is going to help them, then we are thinking “why would they be that crazy and not make the allocation?”.

The issue is with us, we the salespeople. We have not provided enough value to warrant any change in the current allocations. This is me too, when I am the buyer. If I get hit up for some expenditure and I am not convinced that at that price point I am getting sufficient value, then I reject the offer. I don’t say it directly though. I try to be gentle and nice and just say “it is not in my budget”.

Well that is crap actually. My budget, like everybody else’s budget is a set of random numbers in cells in spreadsheets. Budgets are built on assumptions, hopes, expectations and aspirations – the whole thing is a tissue of lies and wishful thinking. On the left side of the P&L is written some words describing the topic. Things like salary, rent, marketing. On the right side on that line, under the column for the current month there sits a figure attached to that topic.

Where did that figure come from? It was an assumption at the start of the year, of where the money would be likely be spent in the next twelve months. In reality, though we overspend in some areas and underspend in others. If we are motivated enough, we can find the money. We just take it out of one cell and transfer to another. So “I don’t have any budget for this” is simply buyer self-delusion.

Fine, but what can we do about it? The value persuasion failure is due to a number of factors. We may not have fully understood their business or their needs, so we have been suggesting the wrong or a weak solution. They don’t find this convincing enough. Maybe our questioning component of the sales interview was insufficient in scope or maybe they didn’t open up to us and tell all. We only got the tip of the iceberg and their real concerns are still lurking under the waterline.

Remember that often this is the first or second meeting with a client and the first full sales call. We are a relative stranger to them. Yet here we are as bold as brass, interrogating them within an inch of their life, like one of those hardened detectives on a rough beat, that you see in movies. If the trust hasn’t been established then they may not want to expose all their firm’s dirty laundry to a new face.

Or maybe we did understand, but the solution we presented didn’t grab them. This can be the issue of the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, being too small. I had this recently. I went through the solution in detail but I could sense this wasn’t pushing any excitement buttons. I failed to explain well enough how the solution I was proposing for the money sought, was going to improve their business results.

Reflecting on that meeting later, I realised I hadn’t done a good enough job of drawing out word pictures of how things would be different inside the company once they had our solution. I didn’t describe in enough detail how the people would be changed and really firing. I was operating at 30,000 feet and needed to get down on the deck more about the positive differences we would bring. They felt they could get where they wanted to go under their own steam, without my invaluable help and assistance. That failure to make the sale was on me.

Welcome Back In other cases, it might be a timing issue on budgets. The person we are talking to has to justify the number to someone in the windowless basement room downstairs, who are wearing green eye shades, shirt arm bands and counting the money. The sacred budget created at the start of the year doesn’t include this allocation and now we want to make a change. This is where we have to get creative. We need to look for payment timings that won’t trigger alarm bells in the accounting section. Maybe we split the payments across months or financial years, to make it easier to get through the bean counters. Maybe we deliver the service or product now and get paid later? In many countries you wouldn’t dream of doing that, but Japan is different in that regard, because you are unlikely to get ripped off.

This timing issue came up recently. I had made a full solution proposal and the local team liked it. Headquarters in Europe however had a meltdown. Well they would wouldn’t they! Anytime you take that miserable EU peso and put it into yen, the currency calculations boggle their old world imaginations. Never mind that this is a totally different economy. Or that their own local staff salary bill here in Japan is totally vast, compared to what they are facing in Europe for the same level positions. They conveniently overlook these realities and can’t get their head around spending such a huge sum of money. The exception would be Scandinavian countries because their pricing is always higher than ours in Japan.

Fortunately, we were able to come up with some solutions that enabled the local Country Head to move one set of numbers from one cell to another and do the business. This was worked into this year’s and next year’s budgets. This proves my point. They actually had the money all along, so it was an allocation problem not a sufficiency issue.

As salespeople we can get confused about this and think we have to start slashing our numbers to push the deal over the line, but this is a false flag. Come on - we have to be better than that. This discounting course of action is the mantra of the amateur salesperson who doesn’t have a clue about what they are doing. These people spoil it for the rest of us by the way and I wish they would depart the profession and leave it to the professionals. In this example, it was just a question of being able to pony up the value component sufficiently to get them to make the switch. So sometimes “it is not in my budget” can be rejigged and it is our job to make that happen. Step One is to change our mindset and never believe what we are being told and instead get busy and start working on creative ways to belie that statement.