The person you are talking to is often not the person who decides

There is a second conversation you are not in

A small business selling to any organisation larger than itself tends to assume the person on the phone is the buyer. Sometimes they are. Frequently they are the person who has been asked to sort something out, and the actual decision involves somebody else — a manager, an owner, a committee, a spouse, a finance function.

The consequence is that your proposal is not really being read by the person you sent it to. It is being read by them, and then re-presented, badly, to somebody whose priorities are different. Most of what goes wrong at this stage happens in that second conversation, and none of it is visible from where you’re standing.

Find out early, without making it awkward

The question does not have to be blunt. Asking who else will be involved in the decision, or how these things usually get approved, is an ordinary piece of process enquiry and nobody takes offence at it. It is also enormously informative: the answer tells you how long it will take, what will be required, and whether the person in front of you can actually say yes.

Asking has a second benefit. It signals that you have done this before and understand how organisations work, which for a very small supplier is a useful thing to establish. Not asking leaves you guessing, and the guess is almost always too optimistic.

Your contact is an advocate who needs ammunition

Once you know somebody else decides, the job changes. You are no longer persuading the person you are speaking to; you are equipping them to persuade somebody else, at a meeting you will not attend, without you there to answer the obvious objection.

That means giving them something forwardable: a document that stands alone, a clear price, a short explanation of why this approach rather than another, and an answer to the question they will inevitably be asked about cost. A proposal that only works with you narrating it is of no use to your advocate, and their failure will be reported to you as the client going quiet.

The decider cares about different things

Your contact usually wants the problem solved and wants it to be straightforward. The person approving it often cares about something else entirely: whether the money is available, whether this sets a precedent, whether the supplier is a risk, whether it can be justified if it goes wrong.

Those concerns are rarely mentioned by your contact, because they aren’t their concerns. Addressing them anyway — a sentence on why the price is what it is, something establishing that you are an established business rather than an unknown, a clear statement of what happens if things go wrong — costs a paragraph and removes the objections that would otherwise be raised in your absence.

It changes how the price should be presented

A number given verbally to a sympathetic contact will be repeated inaccurately. A number written down, attached to what it covers and dated, survives the journey.

It also helps to make the price easy to compare against whatever the alternative is in the approver’s mind, which is often doing nothing rather than a competitor. Saying what the situation costs if it continues unaddressed is not a sales technique; it is the comparison the decision is actually being made against, and your contact may not have thought to make it.

When the decision stalls internally

A quote that goes silent before any work begins is usually not a rejection. More often the internal conversation has not happened, or happened and was deferred, or the person who has to approve it is dealing with something else entirely.

The useful response is to make it easy to restart rather than to apply pressure. A short message offering to answer questions, or to provide a version of the document suited to whoever needs to see it, gives your advocate something to act on. And asking directly whether it would help to speak to the other people involved is offered far less often than it should be, given how frequently the answer is yes.

It is also worth asking, at the point the quote goes out, when a decision is expected and what happens next. A contact who says the approval meeting is in three weeks has just told you when to follow up and why. Without that, every subsequent message is a guess about timing, and guessing produces either a nudge that arrives too early to be useful or a silence that lasts until the work has gone elsewhere.