In Don’t Lose Deals By Belaboring Business Value, I’d warned that B2B technology vendors risk losing a deal by belaboring business value all the time.
In this post, I’ll describe my experience with a startup that failed to heed this warning, and lost the deal – and more – as a result.
I was recently helping a customer hire some sales people. Around this time, I heard of this new job portal that focused on JIT hiring by sourcing candidates who’ve already resigned their existing jobs.
Companies face a major pain area of candidates who accept a job offer and then fail to join because they use the offer to negotiate a better deal with their existing employers. By staging a pool of job aspirants who have already resigned from their current jobs and are serving out their notice periods, this startup seemed to solve this pain point. I was very impressed with its compelling business value and headed straight to its website.
On its homepage, I found “sales” to be a trending skill. I was pleased to see this since many job portals contain only geek profiles. I immediately clicked the sales hyperlink and was presented with a screenful of job seekers in sales.
Based on the summary provided against each entry on this page, the third candidate seemed most suitable for my needs. When I clicked it, I was promised additional details by completing a form:
I wasn’t very thrilled about having to provide my contact info at this stage but I could empathize with the lead generation target of the company’s marketing manager! So, I entered my coordinates and submitted the form.
I expected to see more details of the selected candidate on the next page or receive an email immediately with his or her resume.
However, none of that happened.
Instead, the following day, I got a call from someone from the startup, wanting to “understand my business needs and my specific requirements”.
I told him, duh, why don’t you send me the additional details as promised by the lead form and we’ll talk later?
The guy was obviously not aware of the steps I’d taken on his website before contacting him and was clueless about what I was asking.
In other words, the startup didn’t recognize that I’d already traversed the top and middle funnel stages by myself and was now at the bottom of the funnel, anxious to push the hiring process forward by interviewing the candidate and discussing fees and other engagement details.
By forcibly taking me back to the top of funnel and unnecessarily belaboring business value, the startup not only lost my business but also erased my positive first impression of it.