The question worth asking after every sales call

What to change

Act on the recurring items and ignore the one-offs.

If the turning point is consistently price, the work is in what precedes it. Either the value is not established before the number arrives, or the number is wrong.

If the unstated worry is consistent, answer it before it is raised. Putting it in your marketing or early in the conversation removes an objection that was previously costing you deals silently.

If the gap is structural, fix the structure. Usually this means adding a defined ending to the call, which is the single most common missing piece.

What not to do is rewrite your whole approach after one bad conversation. Individual calls are noisy, and the point of the record is to separate the pattern from the noise.

Including the wins

The instinct is to analyse losses, which gives you half the picture.

Successful calls contain the moment things became likely, and that moment is as informative as the one where things fell apart. Frequently it turns out to be something small and repeatable, such as a particular way of describing the first step.

Knowing what works lets you do it deliberately rather than accidentally. Most people can name what goes wrong in their calls and have no idea what goes right.

Making it survive

The habit fails for one reason, which is that it does not get done immediately.

Two minutes, in the same place, before the next thing. If it waits until the end of the day, the detail is gone and the entry is a summary of a feeling, which is what you were trying to escape.

Keep the four fields identical every time. Consistency is what makes the set readable later, and the temptation to elaborate on interesting calls is what destroys comparability.

Asking the prospect directly

The record tells you what you noticed. The prospect noticed something different, and occasionally you can get it.

For deals that did not proceed, a short message a week later asking what tipped it works more often than people expect. Not to reopen the sale. Explicitly not that, and saying so is what makes the answer honest.

The replies are frequently surprising. Reasons that never came up in the conversation, concerns you thought you had handled, or something practical that had nothing to do with your argument.

One in three will answer. Those answers are worth more than any amount of self-review, because they come from the only person who actually made the decision.

For deals that did proceed, ask at the start of the engagement what nearly stopped them. Clients answer this freely once they have committed, and the answer tells you which objection to pre-empt next time.

When the record contradicts your instinct

This is the useful part and the uncomfortable one.

Most people have a theory about why they win and lose. The written record frequently disagrees, and the disagreement usually goes one way. Sellers overestimate how much the quality of their explanation matters and underestimate how much the shape of the process matters.

A common finding: calls were lost not because the argument was weak but because nothing concrete happened at the end. Another: the prospects who converted were already further along before the call, which is a targeting result rather than a selling one.

Both conclusions point at changes that have nothing to do with being more persuasive, which is why they would not have surfaced from reflecting on how the conversations felt.

If you only do one thing

Write the turning point. One sentence, after every call, in the same document.

Skip the other three fields if they will stop you doing it at all. The turning point alone, recorded twenty times, will tell you more about your sales process than any course, because it is drawn from your conversations with your buyers about your offer.

Most people have never written it down once. Twenty entries is a quarter of casual effort and a permanent change in what you know about your own business.