Prevent Managed Service Prospects Getting Cold Feet

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When you’ve put in the hard work to land a new managed service client, the last thing you want is for them to go dark after you’ve handed them the contract. In this article, I share a simple tip to help improve your close rate.

This is how it often plays out: You do discovery, everything feels good, and the client is keen to fix their problems.

You do some more meetings; again, the client is willing, things are moving forward, and you’ve gained excellent momentum.

You go back to your office and draw up the contract. Once you put on the final, carefully crafted touches, you send it over via email for the prospect to look at.

Then nothing…

You ring the client up, but you seem to have lost all that momentum you had before. They seem a little cagey about signing the contract now.

What changed?

You lost momentum when you emailed the contract.

Email is obviously the most efficient way to send the contract to your client, but it lacks the “emotional buzz” you had before.

Most people buy on emotion, and emotion was involved in each step before.

During discovery, they were happy to get many of their problems off their chest; it feels good to list your gripes.

As you list how you can solve these problems, they feel lighter. There is now hope they can get beyond these problems that have been plaguing them for so long.

They say yes to everything, and then you go back to your office and draft the contract.

But that emotion is gone when it arrives in their inbox a few days later. Everything has gone cold.

Now they look at the price shown on the contract and don’t feel the positive vibes about it that they did before. Now it’s cold-hard money being asked for without any of those warm and fuzzies.

You’ll get some “umms and ahhs” and “we’re still reviewing it” when you follow up, but you’ll often lose the sale.

So what can you do to prevent this?

Get the contract signed in person. But you don’t just slap it on the table and ask them to sign. You need to sell them what you are offering again and how it will put them in a better position than before.

You can do a roundup of everything you discussed in the past meetings.

• This is to solve your immediate problems.
• That is to prevent issues from happening in the future.
• These things allow your team to get more done.

When they are back in that hopeful zone of finally sorting out their problems and agreeing to go with you, you can bring out the contract and have them sign the dotted line.

Managed service providers may be very logical, but emotion plays a large part in managed service sales. Ensure you remain aware of your client’s feelings in your sales process.