Do you have a problem with customers or prospects who put off buying decisions? How do you deal with them?

Joseph Ciringione is North American sales manager for IGUS.

We sell polymer machine components to manufacturers of machinery. We do small to large sales, anything from $100 to a million dollars. The million-dollar sales are more long-term. My team has 50 salespeople across North America.

Sure, customers delaying decisions is a challenge. I have been doing this for a long time, and I do not have any easy recommendations or typical advice.

Usually, we try to take all the objections off the table. That is the most important thing, to make sure there is nothing preventing them from making a decision. And if there is a delay in the decision, we want to make sure it is not because of anything the salesperson has not done or addressed. Once that is done, there is only so much you can do. It is up to the customer.

The second thing is that sometimes you find that the delay in decision is because you are not talking to the real decision maker. There is a second person involved. I recommend to my people that they find out who this other person is and meet with that person. If possible, get the person you have been dealing with to bring you to this second person, find out any objections, and overcome them.

Ross Dabrow is sales manager at Getty Images.

With us, customer delays are not much of an issue because most of our sales are very time-sensitive and the customers do not have three months to make a decision.

We license photos and motion picture imagery around the world. We have a massive library of images, so if you just shot a commercial you might come to us for production footage that would complement the footage you have already shot. Say you walk into Citibank and see a photo of a woman and her daughter, they did not shoot that, but they got it from a company like us.

Most of our sales are very creative. If a customer does come to us, he needs an image from someone right away. If he does not get it from us, he will get it from one of our competitors. There is no delay, but on the other hand, when the customer says no, it’s a permanent no.

It is a unique industry, and there are not many companies that do what we do. Most people do not realize we exist and yet they are looking at our images every day. Each company in our field is specialized with different collections and different formats, each one is unique. There is one company that specializes in news, so that is who you are going to go to for news images. On the other hand, if they want our images, they will say yes fast.

Al Gaskill is national sales manager for Natural Selection.

Customer delays tend to be a challenge in our business, as we sell technical products that have a lot of features and functions and sometime there is a tendency to get a little deer-in-the-headlights reaction.

We sell engineering application software. It is a very long sales cycle, six to 12 months. It is very much relationship selling. And it is a very diverse audience. We sell to any company that manufactures products. Previously, we sold exclusively to manufacturers, but now we are going into more retail businesses, for example Best Buy and Circuit City. It is an evolving market, which is a good place to be in software.

We always go in with a closing strategy, but the way it has worked out in the cycle, we have to pay more attention to the buying process than to the selling process. We have to think in terms of what is important to customers and what their issues are. Then we have to map our product into their visions, so they can see it in their processes and see how they will use the product to solve their problems. And, since it is a new kind of product, they have to know that we will be there every step of the way. They are not just buying CD-ROMs, they are buying solutions, and we have to get that message conveyed.

Getting to the real decision maker is also a continuous issue. Our champions are usually at the lower level. But this application will affect the entire enterprise, so it is very important to get sponsorship from senior management.

Jeff Davis is vice president of sales at GA Communications.

We sell to major retailers, and we are selling services – advertising design, production, creative services, technology – for print, broadcast, and the Web.

The sales cycle is really long, usually from three to six months, or in some cases a couple of years. So I am not sure delay is really much of a challenge for us.

Lots of times with new customers our competition is within the company we are trying to sell to. For example, we may be making a presentation at the VP level, and under that person there are managers who are trying to hold on to what they do internally as opposed to outsourcing the work to a company like ours. In a way, we are selling to our competitors, because the company has an in-house advertising department that does what we do.

We have to be sensitive to those issues because if ultimately they do decide to look outside for help, the in-house people in the advertising department will have to be brought over to our side. So we must defer 100 percent to the company’s wishes.

Advertising is our core business, but the retailer’s core business is selling furniture or groceries. Our entire business revolves around what we can do more efficiently or cost-effectively. Sometimes we talk to retailers who may be under contract to another firm for a couple of years, but they want to learn more about us. We don’t pressure them or anything like that. We have a very low-key approach. We visit them in their offices or bring them to take a tour of our offices. It does not do any good to push them. That is not our way. Patience is our approach. We want them to want to move forward with GA. We put our clients and prospective clients first.

Darren Gilbert is technical sales manager for Rahn USA.

I have just joined a new company, the subsidiary of a Swiss company, and we are opening the U.S. market for them. Right now, I am both the sales manager and the sales force.

I have spent most of my career in the cosmetics field. The biggest challenge that I have faced is that certain people think they are the decision makers, but they are really not the decision makers.

In the industry that I deal with, the marketing people are really the ones who dictate how and when a new product will start. The people we call on are on the technical side of the house, but all of a sudden the marketing people get wind of what somebody else is doing and they change the entire program. So the frustration level grows. And the marketing people keep themselves very protected, they don’t let the people who are supplying them know who they are.

So when customers put you off, many times it is because the decision is out of their control. Sometimes they say they can’t buy from you because of their strategic partners, while they have somebody else they are buying from.

It depends as well on how technically complex the product is, and how important it is to a customer. If it is a commodity, they have more power to push you off and buy from someone else. And they may not give you a true answer, which is that they just like the other guy better. But if the product is complex, you can bypass some of these people and get your product approved by the people who do wield the real power. Then you are the only supplier, and the other people are forced to deal with you.

So I like to stick with the technical side, sell complex products and bring solutions, rather than be just another source. I want to sell myself as a resource to the customer. I want to get to know them and have them share their problems with me, even if these are unrelated to my product line. I might have some experience in the area and can suggest something that might help them. If I can help them by suggesting someone they can call, that builds trust and puts me up another notch or two.

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