How to handle a buyer who won't make a decision

Help them to the finish line

We’ve all come across buyers who can’t seem to make their mind up — the person who keeps asking for more information, says they are still early in the process, avoids committing to deadlines or pushes back on bringing their colleagues into meetings. The indecisive buyer.

Buyer indecision is incredibly common in B2B sales because the “job” of buying products and services from vendors isn’t in the list of day-to-day job responsibilities for most businesspeople, even those in positions of authority.

However, its also incredibly easy to misinterpret buyer indecision as a form of negotiation, playing hard to get in order to get the best deal possible, which leads sellers down completely the wrong path and results in losing the deal.

Learning to spot an indecisive buyer and adjust your sales approach is an essential skill for sellers who frequently find themselves in long sales cycles that end with a “timing not right” or “no decision” closed lost reason.

In this issue I break down the problem and cover the following topics:

• Common mistakes that sellers make with indecisive buyers

• How to spot an indecisive buyer

• How to build a buying process for an indecisive buyer

• How to make a prescriptive recommendation to help an indecisive buyer

• How to surface and address objections with an indecisive buyer

Common mistakes that sellers make with indecisive buyers

• Pushing too hard on an incorrectly assumed critical event.

  • “You said you wanted to get this live by <date>. We need to get a contract signed in order to make that happen!”.

  • Just because a buyer mentions a date, it doesn’t mean its always set in stone, especially if its not tied to a corporate goal or initiative.

• Manufacturing urgency with time-sensitive discounts.

  • “I can give you 20% off our rate card but only if you sign by the end of my quota period the month!”.

  • This is seldom a good approach in any sales situation, least of all when a buyer hasn’t even decided what they want to do yet.

• Overloading the deal with unnecessary scope.

  • “Since you seem to have your team engaged, let’s go with the enterprise option now to avoid procurement headaches next time.”

  • This only adds more complexity to an already difficult decision.

• Padding the ROI calculation.

  • “Let’s revisit the model to see if changing our assumptions results in more revenue / cost savings”

  • ROI is seldom the sole reason a deal doesn’t go through. People tend to make buying decisions based first on emotional impact and then justify them with rational impact. It’s seldom the other way around.

• Creating FOMO.

  • “Your competitors already have an AI-powered ______. If you guys don’t get one soon, you’ll be left behind.”

  • Loading up the fear factor only increases the fear of making a mistake. It doesn’t make the decision easier.

How to spot an indecisive buyer