"Can You Buy This?"

Years ago, back when I was selling 3D printers, I had this big deal with a school.

They were going to buy all these printers.

The teacher was excited about it. The department head was excited about it. My boss knew about it. It was in our pipeline for weeks.

And then when it came time for me to deliver the quote and get the purchase order, they said, "Actually, we can only buy hardware from this approved vendor list, and you're not on it."

Suddenly, what was gonna be this great big deal for me and my team went right off the cliff.

Unfortunately, sometimes we get so caught up in making the customer fall in love with the product and trying to find out, do you want to buy this? We fail to ask the critical question:

Can you buy this?

In order to avoid this kind of heartbreak, we can build in critical questions to our sales process that will help us navigate this.

These are questions like:

What's your purchasing process and who's involved?

How do you typically buy things like this?

What do you need to see from me in order to make this purchase go through?

So don't get caught like me.

Focus on "do you want this", but also, "Can you buy this?"

That's how we build predictable, reliable pipeline.