When we were younger and in the throes of love, it was a common question to ask and wonder, “why don’t they like me?”, “why did they say NO to going out with me?”

If you are a teenager reading this, I’d like to inform you that the battle and the angst never ends!

Because eventually we get married, start a family, start a business, and then the question now becomes, “why won’t they do business with me?”, and “how did I fail to close that deal?”.

Unrequited love is a fact of life!

We will always struggle with unconsummated relationships until the day we die!

There could be several reasons why your heart throb decided to date someone else, however those reasons may be legion and they are beyond the scope of this post.

Fortunately the reasons why people fail to do business with us is much easier to answer!

There are very few reasons that we can discern and that we can fix so that sealing the deal with someone else becomes a lot easier.

The main reason why people fail to “go out with us” in business is because we never ask!

We invest a lot of time and effort into getting the expertise, setting up the website, looking credible, working on our brand messaging, advertising to clients, securing the meeting with potential customers, making the presentation, and the end of it all what do we do?

We do nothing!

Because of that, the potential customer rightly says, “thank you very much for your wonderful presentation. You have given me a lot to think about. Let me think about it and get back to you.”

As you leave the meeting venue you give yourself a pat on the back because you had a “wonderful meeting” full of smiles and laughter.

But two weeks later and things start feeling a little complicated! You aren’t sure if they’re interested or not! You don’t know where you guys stand anymore!

In situations like these, the reason why you failed to close the deal is because YOU DIDN’T MAKE AN EFFORT!

Making a presentation isn’t enough to close the deal in itself.

You have to ASK FOR THE RELATIONSHIP, you have to ask for their business!

If you make the presentation, and it was wonderful, and they gave you a standing ovation, most people will give some variation of “thanks but let me think about it”. The average person is decision averse and will delay making a decision for as long as reasonably possible.

If you make the presentation however, and after your standing ovation you ask, “is there anything I’ve failed to address? So if we are in agreement on XYZ the next step is the payment of a deposit for the amount of ABC, how soon would you like to go ahead?” then now there’s a specific question on the table that the potential customer has to answer to right now!

If the customer says YES then congratulations! You are in business together!

If they say NO then all you have to do is ask further questions to be sure your understanding of their problem, their context or their goals was correct.

Most likely you failed to address something, or maybe they aren’t confident about something in your sales pitch.

If you ask questions about that now, then you’ll have all the information you need to bring the sales conversation back on track.

A simple approach like this would suffice, “I thought ABC was important to you and that if we could achieve XYZ then we would be good to go! So what did I miss out on here?”

From their response you might get that your understanding was correct, but they don’t think YOU have the skill set to deliver on the promises of XYZ.

In that case you have a credibility and a competence problem and there are a few options for trying to remedy that.

Either way, until you ask for the marriage and give a specific question that they either have to say YES or NO to, they will most likely want to think about it and you’ll be left wondering what happened to all the fire in the relationship.

For most people the answer to the question is very obvious.

Why did you fail to close the deal?

Because you never asked!