The Entrance is a statement of the conditions for which prospects' projects you will accept. Think of it as the notice on a shop's front door. For example: "clients who can provide specifications" or "clients who have the required documents ready." In business terms, it corresponds to lead-qualification criteria based on your ideal customer profile (ICP).
What you'll learn in this chapter: How do you reduce requests that aren't a good fit? Make the ability to provide specifications a condition, and put answers to the five most frequently asked questions on one page.
Whereas Chapter 9 dealt with "the order of price and conditions," this chapter deals with the order-acceptance conditions placed at the Entrance themselves. It's the chapter where you decide what to make a condition and what not to.
The more ambitious the goal, the more you should decide in advance what work you won't do. In running stretch goals, this is surprisingly easy to overlook. In digital marketing terms, it corresponds to publishing your lead-qualification criteria on your website.
Scene: The Month They Couldn't Turn Down a Pleasant Request
In the middle of a peak month, a request came in. The voice on the phone was polite, and the conversation flowed. "Our previous supplier would handle just about anything, you know."
The specifications hadn't been decided yet. Even so, because the client seemed pleasant, the president took it on.
Over the next three weeks, the specifications changed again and again, and each time the quote had to be reissued. Meanwhile, two other clients, who had come for a consultation with everything down to the drawings ready, were kept waiting.
Which request should have been turned down back then?
Writing your order-acceptance conditions clearly is not about shutting prospects out. It's about protecting the time of the prospects who meet your conditions.
What happens if you don't write down your conditions? Poorly matched requests gather in the peak month, and the time you prepared runs short. Moreover, if the conditions exist only in your salespeople's heads, they disappear the day that person changes. If they're written on the page, the same line remains even when the assigned employee changes.
The more you hide your conditions, the more prospects who don't meet them get in touch, while promising prospects leave still feeling uncertain. It's ironic. Lead qualification is easier for both sides when it's done up front, at the stage of delivering information, rather than through phone calls and email exchanges.
The Entrance Line
The Entrance line is not decided by "they seem pleasant."
• If your work involves delivering something: "clients who can provide specifications (drawings, dimensions, and so on)."
• If your work involves clients submitting documents: "clients who have the required documents ready."
Seeming pleasant, having a referral, having received special treatment before: none of these is made a condition. However well-spoken and enthusiastic a client may be, requests whose scope keeps growing stop here.
Figure 13. What to include, and not include, in the Entrance conditions
Five Questions to Answer in Advance
Before a big purchase, the questions prospects ask again and again are largely the same.
• How much will it cost?
• How many days will it take?
• Is it the same for our industry?
• If something goes wrong, who will come?
• What kinds of orders are you not suited for?
Put these five together on one page, without hiding anything. Even if it's hard to state prices clearly, you can write what moves the price. If prospects read it before a meeting, the inquiries you receive will come closer to topics your team has already answered. The number of inquiries may even go down, but this book does not treat increases or decreases in the number of inquiries as results.
The word "decline" carries a certain weight.
Many people find it hard to say.
But what's being described here isn't about closing a door. It's about putting up one small signboard at the Entrance, so that promising prospects can come in without hesitation. That's all.
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