"That's a great question!"
Has this ever happened to you? This recently happened to one of my coaching clients. He's in commercial real estate and his prospect asked, "What space do you have available?"
My client got very excited thinking that he had a "hot prospect." He researched and researched and then called the prospect back. In these types of scenarios what typically happens is either:
1. It's impossible to ever again reach that prospect directly or,
2. The prospect says, "None of those spaces seem right."
In this case, this coaching client heard scenario No. 2 and, thus, was unable to leverage all of his hard work into an appointment.
Here is another example with another client: She's with an IT firm that routinely saves their clients significant dollars on their IT spending while increasing the security of their data and operations. A prospect recently asked her, "Exactly how will you save my company money?" My client told the prospect she would get back to him, hung up the phone and was totally confused about how to proceed.
Bottom line: She did not have an appointment.