The great Zig Ziglar said every sale has five basic obstacles. No need, no money, no hurry, no desire, and no trust. When I was a dedicated closer I pasted that quote on the wall in front of me and stared at it on every call. Like a Buddhist disciple.
Over time I turned it into a negotiation acronym. DEBUT. Decision maker, Entrusted, Bank, Urgency, and Timing. Five parts of one framework that has seen me take close rates from 2% to over 70% in months.
This is part one. Timing.
Time Kills All Deals
There is an old sales expression. Time kills all deals. It is true and it is also incomplete, which is why timing is probably the most misunderstood obstacle in the whole framework.
Take web enquiries as example. If you respond to an inbound lead within an hour you increase your chances to close the sale by around seventy percent. In buyer behaviour terms, someone googles your service, reaches out, and approximately seven seconds later they are on your competitor’s website. In areas like consumer goods, barbecues, clothes, fishing poles. The lead goes stale in minutes, because these days your competitor is one swipe away. But really time kills all deals means on a long enough timeline all deals go stale.
That is one face of timing. Act fast or lose the deal. But time is a cruel mistress and there is more to this.
Timing Is Also Completely Irrelevant
Maintenance contractors. Painting companies. Facility managers. Security firms. Cleaning companies. Any business that operates on a contract renewal cycle knows this intimately. The contract comes up every two years. For a year and three quarters, timing is an absolute blocker and there is nothing you can do about it. You can have the best offer in the market, great service and pricing, the warmest relationship, the most compelling case. None of it matters because the timing is wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Then, in the three or four months before the contract renews, timing is everything. If you don’t get your tender in on time, you missed the boat.
The salesperson who understands this stops wasting energy trying to accelerate a timeline that is fixed and starts investing that energy in being exactly the right person in exactly the right place when the window opens. I call this being Johnny-on-the-spot. Good sales people know how to do this effortlessly and it looks like luck.
Luck is the residue of design.
Stop doing useless follow ups to be a ‘good bloke’ you’re just wasting everyone’s time. My first day in construction sales the sales manager said to me ‘the number one most important thing in construction sales, and you will sink or swim in this, if you promise to call someone back on a set date you do it, no questions asked’. Timing in construction is to the day important. In projects over fifty million they can be 5 year cycles. They start with the developer and the design teams, then the planning and approval stages, then piling and foundations, then base build or the concrete frame, then exterior, and finally the fit out like painting and carpet etc.
If you call trying to sell carpet, while they are pouring concrete you’ll be told ,not so politely to, please remove yourself.
There Is No Statute of Limitations on a Sale
The average number of follow-ups before a sale closes is eight. I have prospects in my system I have followed up more than fifty times. And here is the part that surprises people. No matter how many times I offer to let them off the hook, they say no, please keep calling, I need the reminder to go ahead with Outsold.
That tells you something important. A no right now is not a no forever.
Stuff happens. Life is complicated. Someone’s dog died. They are still making three car payments. The mother-in-law moved in so selling the house is off the table for the moment. None of those things have anything to do with your offer. They are just life sitting on top of a decision that has not yet been made.
Do not mistake ‘no, not now’ for ‘maybe’. And do not mistake maybe for no.
Maybe is actually the most dangerous word in sales. When a prospect says maybe it usually means one of two things. Either you have not taken them far enough along the buying journey for them to feel confident, or worse, you are not talking to the decision maker. Maybe from someone who is pretending to be a decision maker.
The Most Underused Sentence in Sales
Many clients are genuinely surprised when I agree to follow up with their prospects in two years. I say it completely without hesitation. No problem, I will call you in six months. Or twelve. Or whenever makes sense. It takes skill to know the difference between a lie and not now’ which I can’t even explain.
Confidently delaying a follow up does five things simultaneously. It shows you are confident in your offer. It signals you are not desperate for the business. It demonstrates you are not going to be pushy. It tells them your company will still be there when the timing is right. And it builds the kind of trust and familiarity that money cannot buy and a cold call cannot manufacture.
I have called hundreds of people back after two years and said you may not remember me but we spoke once two years ago and you asked me to follow up now. One hundred percent of the time they say actually I do remember that conversation. People remember being treated with patience and respect far longer than they remember a pitch. Sure you can follow this prospect up needlessly fifty times, and they will hate you by the time the contract is open.
Never get off the phone without agreeing a next step. Even if that next step is two years away. An open pipeline entry with a date attached is worth more than a closed lost record and a forgotten relationship.
What Timing Actually Teaches You
Timing is not an obstacle you overcome. It is information you use.
When timing is wrong, your job is to stay present without being a pest, to build the relationship without pressure, and to be the obvious first call when the window opens. When timing is right, your job is to move faster than you think is necessary because the window is narrower than it looks.
The sales pipeline management discipline that separates good operators from great ones is almost entirely about timing. Knowing which deals to push, which to nurture, and which to put on a long cycle and revisit without apology. A well-run CRM is not a contact database. It is a timing system. Every entry should have a task and a date attached to it. If it does not, it is not a pipeline entry. It is a graveyard.
Sales in Australia is full of timing mistakes. Leads pursued too aggressively too early. Relationships abandoned too soon. Follow-up sequences that stop at four touches when the prospect needed twelve. The businesses that build sustainable revenue understand that the sales clock runs on the buyer’s timeline, not the seller’s quarterly target.
Part two of this series covers the second obstacle in DEBUT. Urgency and how it is not timing. Read it at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
Jamie May is the Managing Director of Outsold, an Australian founder-led sales agency specialising in outsourced sales teams, fractional sales management, and B2B lead generation across Sydney, Melbourne, and nationally.
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