Winning New Business For Dummies

Chapter 13

Asking for the Order

IN THIS CHAPTER

Maintaining your professional, straightforward manner

Handling the procurement department

When your sales cycle reaches a natural conclusion, hopefully aligned to your prospect’s buying cycle, the time to ask for the order arrives. This needs to be a smooth and natural progression of the sales cycle and not some momentous event that you build up in your head. Asking for the order — the topic of this chapter — generally marks the end of the sales cycle and the beginning of the implementation phase, and you need to make it as seamless as possible.

Don’t forget, though, that you do need to ask for the order, or you risk never getting it or at least delaying it. Surprisingly, many new business salespeople trip over on this one simple point and build it up into a huge obstacle. But if you’ve done your qualification correctly (see Chapters 9 and 19), it’s a simple step to achieve.

As the sales cycle has moved through the stages and you’ve been qualifying all along, you understand the criteria that your prospect is buying against, and you have an in-depth understanding of both his problem area and of your solution. You’ve discussed and overcome any objections, you’ve clearly defined the budgets and made sure they’re in line with your proposal, ...