Field note 02 · the second problem · Field Notes
Why does every sale take three meetings?
Because the first two meetings are explanation. The buyer arrived not knowing what you do, the website did not tell them, and the sale has to do the work the message should have done.
The three meetings, one by one.
The first meeting explains what you do. The second explains what you do for them. The third is the actual sale, if the buyer has not lost interest between the second and the third, which is where most of them go. Owners describe this as "our sales cycle is long", as if it were a property of the industry. In most cases it is a property of the message.
What is really happening.
A buyer who understood the offer before the first call arrives with the decision half-made. A buyer who did not arrives with questions, and the meeting becomes a lecture. Nobody buys during a lecture. So a second meeting gets scheduled, and the momentum that exists in a buyer on the day they enquired leaks away over two weeks.
The cost nobody adds up.
Three meetings per sale is three times the founder's hours per sale. If the owner is the one selling, and in a business of this size they usually are, the cost of the long cycle is not just lost deals. It is the owner's week, spent explaining instead of running the business. That is where "the work gets stuck" begins.
The test.
Listen to a recording of a first call, or just remember one. Time how long you talk before the buyer asks a question about price, timing or scope. If it is more than five minutes, the message did not arrive before you did.
What fixes it.
The same sentence that fixes the wrong leads. When the website and the proposal say the one thing the business does, the first meeting starts where the second used to. That is not a sales technique. It is the business deciding what it is, and then saying so before anyone has to ask. A Signal Audit finds out whether that decision has been made, and if it has not, the diagnosis says so in writing.
Two questions this raises.
- Is a long sales cycle always a message problem?
- No. Some purchases are large and slow by nature. But if the buyer spends the first meeting asking what you do, the cycle is long because the message did not arrive first.
- What should the first meeting be about?
- Their problem, not your services. If you have to explain your services, the website has not done its job.
If this is your business, the audit starts here.
Half a day, both of us, your numbers. A written diagnosis that says whether this is the problem, and what to fix first.
Start a Signal Audit