Why “No” Is Better Than “Maybe”

In sales, it is fairly common for a rep to hold on to any lead they can find. Especially in today’s down market, it is more likely than ever for a scarcity principle to exist in one’s mind due to general lack of opportunity. This leads to bad outcomes, and I will explain why.

Intuitively, most people would be of the belief that getting a “maybe” is better than getting a “no.” At least in the case of the “maybe,” as they say in Dumb and Dumber, “you’re telling me there’s a chance!” And to be clear, much of the time that is certainly the case, because in any sales-related conversation you have with a prospective buyer, they are always going to be a “maybe” until they become a “yes.” So of course there are many scenarios where you prefer to have someone who is on the proverbial path to becoming a “yes.”

However, much of the time, you inevitably wind up with scenarios where you spin your wheels with buyers so much that you ultimately would be better off having pulled the plug long ago so that you can focus your time and energy on other things.

Below I will list the reasons why “No” is better than “Maybe” as well as some of the questions you need to ask yourself along the way to know when to spot the warning signs.

1. Your time is valuable.

The primary reason why you may want to get to a “No” as soon as possible is because your time is valuable. Every minute you spend in “Maybeland” (as I call it) is a minute you could be spending finding a customer who really feels the pain that you solve and might come to a conversation with far more engagement. 

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I often will try to encourage prospects to say “No” to me if I sense that they may be wasting my time. I do this for both our sakes: we both free up our time and energy to focus on other things. I’ll do this by explaining to them why it seems like it may not be a fit or why it feels like there may be a lack of urgency.

Nota bene: it is important when doing this to not tell the customer how they feel or ascribe any specific outcome to them. If you couch your statements in how you feel, it leaves room for them to explain why your feelings might be correct or incorrect.

So for example, you can say something like “It feels to me that this may not be a top priority based on the X,Y,Z initiatives you mentioned wanting to work on before, and the pace of our conversations.” This type of statement leaves room for them to say something like “You’re right, let’s revisit next quarter,” or, something else like, “I get why you feel this way, but we’re just a slow-moving business and have some organizational change right now. I still want to focus on this.”

In either scenario, you are a winner. You win in the first scenario because now you have freed yourself from wasting your time and the customer’s time. In the second scenario, you win because you know you should continue your focus here, and now there is probably some motivation from the buyer to double-down, especially now that they know how you are feeling.

Strangely enough, I also give people an “out” in my cold outreach. Literally, when I send a cold e-mail, I will offer at the end that it is no big deal if it is not something they want to pursue. Why do I do this? Two reasons.

First, I don’t want to seem pushy. People are more likely to want to talk to you if they feel like it is not a life or death thing for you. If you are not pushy in your outreach, then chances are, maybe you won’t be a pain to deal with if they want to engage.

But more importantly, I only really want to talk to people with whom my message actually resonates. I’m happy to roll out the red carpet to those who receive my message, understand and experience the pain I am discussing, and want to learn more about my solution. I’m also happy to roll out the red carpet towards an exit door to those who are not very serious about the solution I offer. Too many times, sales reps or those who book appointments are fixated on just landing meetings without being concerned about the potential outcomes of those meetings.

2. The engagement of the customer lasts throughout the entire revenue bowtie 

We often look at sales as a one-sided funnel, but in reality, it is a two-sided bowtie. In fact, it is the other side of that bowtie – in the world of customer success – where most of the revenue in every deal should live in a SaaS environment. This is because a successful SaaS business will retain and expand customers over many years – not just close them for one year. That latter scenario is an unsuccessful and unsustainable business. No one invests in companies that close one year deals whose customers immediately churn.

All this to say, you don’t want to be bullying customers into signing up for your product. Because in the end, it may actually be harmful and unproductive for the company. I’d venture to say it almost certainly will be that way. Because the resources required to bully someone across the finish line and then to handle what is likely to be a disgruntled customer are massive, especially if that customer is a high churn risk (i.e., they will not provide much lifetime value beyond the initial contract).

When customers lead themselves to the finish line, they are far more likely to be in it for the long haul. This means they have more buy-in, exhaust less of your internal resources, and are more likely to stick around for awhile.

What does this have to do with “No”? You should be trying to get it if you fear you might have that former scenario instead of the latter one. Don’t be scared to walk away from a situation that may hurt you in the long run. Just be prepared to explain to the powers that be why you are doing so.

3. What is your ICP?

Related to the point above, you need to firmly understand your Ideal Customer Profile, otherwise known as ICP. The ideal customer typically shares certain attributes. It might be a certain technology that they are using today. It might be the size of their business, or a vertical they occupy, or a very specific pain they experience, or an initiative they are undertaking. It very well could be a combination of various factors.

In my company (and in many companies, to be sure), we grade all of our accounts based on over a dozen criteria. An “A” account is the type of customer who is best-suited for our product and most likely to buy. The “A”’s share certain attributes. Some of them are things I can find online pretty quickly. Some of the attributes are data points I need to obtain once I speak to them, because they involve initiatives happening within the account I would not otherwise know about by Googling online.

You always need to ask yourself what type of customer you are dealing with when you ask the question about “No” and “Maybe.” If you are dealing with a C, D, or F account, the juice may not be worth the squeeze for you if the customer is not actively banging on your door demanding your solution. Sometimes, the accounts might be graded low because there might be more work involved for you in order to make them successful. Again, you need to ask yourself if that is worth your time.

Generally speaking, for an “A” account that is stuck in the world of “Maybe,” you will generally be able to point to something you could be doing better to get them across the hump. It’s not always true, but more often than not it is as long as you are grading properly. In that scenario, you just want to be introspective and fix whatever you are doing wrong rather than give up. Because in order to be an “A” to begin with, they had to deeply experience your pain, actively be seeking a solution, and be relatively less resource-intensive for you to work with. If they’re a “Maybe,” that’s just your fault at that point.

All this to say: grading your accounts will give you a much better idea of where to spend your time.

4. “No” helps you to learn

When building a go-to-market motion, you will inevitably build a sales process as part of the overall effort. The sales process is made up of various stages. I like to call these “the moments that matter.”

Generally speaking, you want to segment each stage of your selling process with very stringent exit criteria. Exit criteria are very objective outcomes that need to have occurred in order to “exit” one stage to enter another. This allows for you to capture data more precisely without leaving it up to emotions or simply how a sales rep feels about a deal.

Throughout the various stages, you learn a lot about how you are performing based on your ability to progress or “convert” from one stage to the next. You may be really good at one stage but really bad at another. This helps you diagnose where your problems are so you can make your process better.

Inevitably, you need a “yes” or a “no” in order to learn anything. When you win a new customer, you will probably want to go back to understand why you won so that you can replicate that motion. The same is true across various stages. Why do you win in each stage? What are you learning along the way about the types of customers who advance at each stage?

Invariably, the same is also true in reverse. When you get a “no,” you want to figure out what went wrong. It’s entirely possible that the reason is outside of your locus of control. It might be that the customer had requirements for certain features you do not offer. However, even in that case, what you might learn is that you did a poor job of qualifying that prospect to begin with, because their requirements for a solution should have been understood early on in the sales process.

What I am trying to get at here is that as long as you have a “maybe,” you are not in a position to learn as much as you could be learning. I am not saying there is nothing to be learned – of course with any opportunity you have, there are things that must have been going well enough to get it to where it is, and perhaps some objections along the way you are drawing from as well. But it is not until you hear “no” that you can officially create a new data point as to what “not” to do moving forward.

Obviously you do not want to be in the mode of pushing customers to say “no.” That would be a lousy thing to do. But there is a real problem that happens to your understanding of your own business when you allow opportunities to fester. The reason for that is because the speed in which you advance through every stage is another key data point that you want to be tracking. This is called “pipeline velocity.” 

Naturally, in any business, you want to always be more efficient and advance your opportunities as rapidly as possible without sacrificing the quality of your process for the customer. In order to do this, you will track pipeline velocity. Even if you were not interested in getting faster, you still need to understand your pipeline velocity in order to accurately forecast for your business.

So, what happens when you diddle around with a bunch of “maybe’s”? You already know the answer. Your metrics get skewed. Each stage is artificially longer than it ought to be, because you are not focusing where you should be focusing.

To be clear, there are plenty of times customers might “diddle around” for the right reasons, and times where it is completely appropriate to hang on to them. I just go back to what I said before: be up front and authentic in your relationships and you can expect to get the same in return. Chances are that if you are being ghosted for long periods at a time, the customer is not engaged enough for whatever reason. There are exceptions. You just need to seek the truth and ask.

5. “No” makes you human

I will close with a pretty straightforward and simple point: “no” makes you human.

Look, if you were trying to build a relationship with a significant other and they had a hard time committing to you, inevitably you would get frustrated. It’s what makes us human. We want commitments from people when we make commitments to them. No one likes to be strung along.

When you take “no” for an answer – better yet, even invite “no” for an answer – you are showing the other person that you are not some sales weasel who cares about yourself. You care about them, too. 

Customers have long memories. They remember people who are pleasant to do business with and they come back to you when they are ready to solve the pain that your solution helps with. 

I had this come back to me in a positive way pretty recently. There is a prospect of mine who has been interested in our technology but has also had some other technology initiatives going on within their organization. We mutually agreed now was not a great time for us to engage. I did not try to force my solution down his throat because I genuinely felt the customer would be better off coming back to me in a year or so.

A few months later, I got an email from a completely different prospect who had a major pain that my product solves. Who referred him to me? You guessed it: the other prospect who said “no” to me. This new prospect has a pain so large and so obvious that it screams for my solution. Whether or not I sell it to them is beside the point. The point is that goodwill will make its way back to you if you are not a pain in the ass with your prospects and you try to do right by them.

I did what anyone should do when someone does them a favor: I thanked the prospect who said “no” to me, because it was kind of him to think of me for the referral. I can assure anyone reading this that if you leave a bad taste in a customer’s mouth – for whatever reason – they will not refer you business even when they meet people who could benefit from having it.

All this to say, don’t be scared of “no.” Take it on with the growth mindset, sniff it out when you can, and run headfirst so you can get to more “yes” a lot faster.