S1: EP23 Letting losers go

Episode Transcript

Vaishali Nikhade 0:02
Hello, everybody, this is Vaishali and today's episode is about letting losers go. And I'm going to talk about it with respect to intuition or using intuition for sales. In a sales pipeline, there are two places that are extremely expensive.

The first one is at the beginning of the pipeline. And then the second one is at the end of the pipeline. So today, we are going to look at both those places in detail. I am talking about sales pipeline. But the analogy or the premise can be applied to anything else in real life as well. And then I'll give you real life examples.

So that you don't limit your understanding to sales, but in other circumstances as well. So the first one is at the beginning of the pipeline, think about engaging a wrong lead at the beginning of the pipeline, and then you chase it, because you want to go and close that lead. And when you close that lead is when you get paid.

However, if it is the wrong lead, what happens is essentially you end up wasting your time chasing that wrong lead, because the person is essentially a tire kicker, he is not the right person, for whatever it is that you are trying to sell. And the best analogy of this would be more relevant to the dating world.

Think about going and dating. For instance, if you're a lady, think about going and dating a guy. And at the beginning of the, let's say, the first date or the initial phase, you have this intuitive trigger, that something is not right with this guy. At the same time, you want to give things a chance. So you decide to kind of go with the flow and keep going.

And then you go and then one month, two month, three month, there seem to be some signals, which tell you that things are not right. But you want to watch and see it play out. And before you know, a year or couple of years are gone. And then whatever you had intuitively felt that the person was a tire kicker or he wasn't the right one for you, or whatever were the other intuitive triggers that we're trying to tell you to disengage in the first place, they all prove to be right.

So in this particular case, what happens is you just ended up wasting however amount of time you were engaged with the person. Because your goal was, let's say, a long term relationship. And this person was just dragging their feet for whatever reason. So in this particular case, if you had just not engaged with that person, then essentially you would have been presented with a different opportunity or another opportunity where you would have to kind of play your cards differently.

So engaging with the wrong lead, right at the beginning phases of a pipeline is what turns out to be extremely expensive in sales in real life or anywhere else as well. Because essentially, you end up spending a lot of time chasing something that is of no use, or that doesn't serve whatever purpose it is that you are trying to achieve.

So that is the first one in the case of a sales pipeline, or in case of making a sale, it would be the same thing that let's say you are making a direct sale, one to one sale. And you call this person and then he asks you to call back and you keep engaging with this person for let's say three months, six months. And at the end of six months, you realize that all your efforts were in vain, because whatever you felt at the beginning was correct.

And essentially he wasn't the right person for this particular sale. In the beginning, the feelings can show up differently for different people, depending on whatever is the intuitive sense that is stronger.

For instance,if you're clairvoyant, then you may just see a vision that there is no deal going to be made, or that this person is a tire kicker, or you shouldn't be engaging, or whatever it is that shows that the final outcome is not going to be what it is that you want. So that would be for clairvoyance.

For clairaudience, you may just hear a soft whisper, and it would say that don't engage with this person, it's not going to get you to your goal. And just this soft whisper, or a message from the universe, should be sufficient for you to kind of proceed with caution and kind of test out if you should move forward with the engagement.

And like I mentioned before, in one of the episodes, it's called combining collective evidence, one signal by itself is not enough, you need at least two three signals. And if all of them point in the same direction, then you pretty much come to one conclusion. So that is for clairaudience.

And then for claircognizance, you will just know that this is not the right person. So any of these abilities, or a combination of these abilities will tell you to disengage right from the beginning. And in case of clairsentience, you'll just feel it, you'll just feel something maybe in the gut of your stomach, or you may just feel that you know, this is not the right person, or this is the right person.

But in this particular example, it's not the right person. So essentially, when all your intuitive senses are screaming, and telling you to not engage, or to proceed with caution, and you keep dragging things on and on and on, what happens is it ends up spending a lot of bandwidth.

So essentially, it's wasted time, and it would have been better to let this person go. So one way is to just kind of keep them on, maybe list and kick them out. based on whatever your parameters are. One way is to kind of chase them up to a certain point and then let them go. And then the last way is, you know, just have your own kind of procedure based on whatever past experiences, you've had to be able to let these people go.

So that is the first point in the pipeline, which is at the very beginning of the pipeline, where you need to let the loser go. And then how you need to let them go, that is going to be defined by your own particular parameters and your own algorithm based on whatever it is that you're trying to achieve.

So that is point number one. The second point is at the end of the pipeline, which means that let's say the beginning of the pipeline is where you have the first handshake, and then the end of the pipeline is where the contract is signed. So if you let them go just before the contract is signed, that becomes very expensive, because they were just about to sign the contract, and then you let them go.

Which means that you kind of spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of bandwidth, to have them travel from the beginning of the pipeline, all the way towards the end, and you got frustrated because things were not moving as quickly as you wanted them to, or getting to the point where you wanted them to.

So you decided to let it go. And then if you had just done one more thing, then things would have actually worked out. So this is where it becomes very expensive to lose a lead. Going back to the example, we can just take the same example of the lady dating this guy. And she goes, let's say she is going out for a certain period of time.

And she has some sort of a parameter that you know, after this point, I'm going to stop and then she decides to break up. And let's say in one case, they would have a conversation and they would be able to patch things up. And in another case, they would not have a conversation and the guy would just kind of goes somewhere else.

Whereas if they had just had that conversation, and that essentially is the point that before you kind of cut that lead, or before you let that lead go, if you just have that one conversation to figure out what is missing or how far you are from where you want to be, then you may actually be able to close it. So this is closing it at the end of the pipeline.

For this particular example, when you would have started working with this lead at the beginning of the pipeline, you would have kind of felt good about it, you would have felt that, Oh, this is actually going to work out and this lead is going to close. And as you move forward and forward, things seem to go in your favor. But at the end, maybe things seem to drag on. And when that happens, if you just throw in the towel, then essentially you lose out.

So again, you've ended up spending a lot of time, a lot of bandwidth, and you are left with no result to prove. So this is an expense or the most expensive lead you can have because you were about to close it and you kind of killed it. So that's closing it at the end of the pipeline. So in either case, or rather, in the first case, it is important to let the losers go based on your parameters.

And then in the second case, it is important to close the gap between you and the other person in order to not let the loser go in order to actually close the lead or close the deal. And kind of leverage whatever time and money and bandwidth that you have invested in that process.

So I hope that you enjoyed this episode and you have a few takeaways for whatever it is that you are working on. And if you're interested to work with me, go ahead and hit the work with me button and I am happy to have a chat with you.

You can fill out the form and then we can have a chat and go from there. I will see you in the next episode. Bye