#001: The Number One Reason Deals Don’t Close (and how to fix it)

#001: The Number One Reason Deals Don’t Close

Read Time: 3 min

Today, I’m going to share the number one reason deals fail to close, why it's happening, and how to fix it permanently.

During the early stages of founder-led sales, there's a lot of confusion around what constitutes a real qualification call and what does not.

Implementing this one tip will optimize your top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) activity with better qualified leads, and reduce the frustration of not closing deals.

Referring back to my earlier point, there is an abundance of confusing content and sales methodologies that are too ambiguous, unclear, and quite frankly, just straight-up bulls**t. It is challenging to execute step C without first understanding steps A and B..

3-5 Quality Discovery Calls Are WAY Better Than 10-12 Unqualified Calls

Before we jump in let’s define what a product and a qualification call is.

Product calls: Are designed to solicit feedback and insights from potential users and get a sense of whether or not you are building something that the market needs. These calls are typically generated from intros, via VC’s and your internal network. 

Qualification (discovery) calls: Are designed to find people who have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. These calls are typically generated through cold outbound messaging, and are considered opportunities once they’ve been qualified, via BANT.

So how do you actively distinguish between the two?

The meeting, or the intent the prospect is agreeing to is based on the messaging you put in front of them

Here’s what I mean. Below is an example of LI messaging one of my clients was using to generate 12-15 “So Called” qualification calls weekly.

You can clearly see through the language if the prospect decided to hop on a call their intent would be to provide feedback.

This is a how you schedule a Product Call.

Now let’s look at another LI example of what qualification content would look like. This is the exact messaging I used to build a seven figure annual recurring business in 3 years.

Here's another one. 

My messaging is clear and my CTA is direct.

This is how you schedule a qualification call.

The number one reason deals don't close is because you are speaking with unqualified prospects. This happens because of misaligned messaging in your copy when soliciting new business.

5 Takeaways

1. Remove the word - feedback, favor, pick your brain, and research from your copy.

2. State in 1-2 sentences what you do. (I’m reaching out, because we help (industry / title) __________ by __________ (solving the problem in a simple, fast and economical way)

3. Use a direct CTA - (Do you need help with this / Does you team need help with this / Is this something you’d be interested in)

4. Qualify deals based on budget, identifying decision makers, use cases, and timing.

5. If the prospect is qualified, schedule the demo by nailing down a day/time followed by a calendar invite.

Direct messaging will reduce your TOFU activity, but you will attract better leads with higher likelihood of converting.

Client Spotlight

Big congratulations to — Tom Hacohen, the Founder & CEO of Svix, on raising a $7.8 million funding round led by A16z. Svix offers webhooks as a service to help companies build secure, reliable, and scalable webhook solutions in minutes, saving them a lot of time, effort, and money. Existing users of the service rave about the technology's incredible scaling capabilities. Tom was a fantastic client and is a great human. Check them out here!