Why Your Deals Go Cold Before You Ever Get to the Close (Ask Jeb)

This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi. I'm Jeb Blunt, best selling author of fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the Sales Gravy Podcast. It's Wednesday, where you drive the agenda. Because on this segment of the Sales Gravy Podcast, you bring your biggest sales challenges, and Jeb Blunt delivers his best answers. And those answers, they come straight from the trenches because Jeb's not just teaching sales. He's out there prospecting, closing, and leading sales teams every single day. So let's take that next caller. Jeb, up next, we have Philip, and he is from The Philippines. Alright. Philip, from The Philippines. Alright, Philip. But tell me what's going on in your world. What I am is a character licensing agent. And, to those who don't know what that is, we represent characters for specific properties from third parties. So, like, these would be video games, anime, films, comics, and, the merchandising and, promotional rights to those, we would be selling to our local partners. And that could be a milk tea chain, an apparel brand, fun run organizer, basically anyone who, wants to use our licensors characters on their products or promotions. Now, our main problem, Jeb, is that, we have trouble moving many of these clients to the close. And what that looks like is they submit a business proposal or forecast. And what we found is our character is at least many of them are popular enough that we can get to the first meeting. So we're talking to the marketing manager, the procurement manager, the design team, even the owner or CEO, depending on how small or big the company is. And if these people happen to be big fans of that character or they know those brands well enough, the sale closes itself. Like, we can get their forecast in a couple of weeks. But, for our other clients who are the opposite, who who don't know the brands or the characters well enough, or they're not a fan, you know, it's crickets, from the, initial follow ups. We, it's not as if we can expect them to say yes at the initial meeting, because it'll take a lot of time and money on their part. For the few that do get back to us, there's usually a specific reason like, oh, we licensed this character already or, oh, your character has nothing new for us. Or do you have so and so instead? They request a character that's not within our portfolio. So we kinda need some good closing techniques to move those deals forward. The companies that come to you that don't know the character very well. So the ones who they know the character, they love the character, they're super easy. Are those companies coming to you versus the ones who don't know the character very well? Are you going …