I tell myself that it’s not just me, everyone keeps score in their head of various personal records, such as they are.
For example, for quite a while, my record for how long it took me to close one particular new account from first contact to getting them to sign was five years.

I’m aware that’s a dubious record. My co-workers used to give me a hard time about that. At least until I beat my old record and finally signed up a dealer I had been talking to off and on for seven years.

Most of the time things in my particular corner move quickly, which is something I often write about. And while indeed most of the time, things happen quickly, sometimes the opposite is true.

There are a lot of reasons why things get delayed. In the case of trying to sign up new dealers, there can be roadblocks.

In the case of the dealer who took five years to sign up with me there was some inertia on their part, but there was also attrition: every time I thought I was finally making progress with their buyer, they’d leave their job, and I had to start over with their replacement.

In that case my efforts required working on three different buyers over time, until they finally hired one who I made a connection with. With the dealer who took seven years, that’s how long before we finally had some brands that they saw value in for their stores.

But other things can take longer than normal.

For example, earlier this year one of my dealers’ clients came back to them on an RFQ (Request for Quote) for a large in-building installation that the dealer had submitted to them, and wanted to proceed. There was just one thing: the RFQ had been submitted over a year prior.

There are a few reasons why an end-user client can take so long to approve and move forward on an RFQ, but most of them boil down to some combination of inertia and money.

I’ve often joked about how some segments of this business have no sales funnel at all: Deals just happen when they happen.

It’s especially common in fleet management: A company will get a quote from one of my dealers on a fleet deployment.Then they’ll ghost my dealer. Zero feedback, never getting back to them. Eventually the sales rep gives up and stops calling them. Months later the client calls or shows up at my dealer’s office. “Yeah, we’re ready to go, when can you schedule the installs?”

While that happens all the time in fleet management, it’s less common for commercial in-building jobs.

Which is why I was taken aback the other week when one of my dealers in the IT space forwarded me an email thread from one of their clients, asking “Lee, can you please update the skus and costs on this quote?”

That’s not an unreasonable ask. Then I looked at the original quote at the bottom of the thread.

September 2019.

Wow.

Five years. It took five years from the time the client was first quoted out to when they finally proceeded. Anyway, in terms of nuts and bolts most of the Bill of Materials on the quote was still current, with only a couple of changes. The biggest difference was the cost. Thanks to five years and a few currency exchange rate hikes the client’s price is now about 25% more than what it would have been if they’d pulled the trigger five years ago.

The sales funnel is a valuable tool for tracking your prospects until they close and become deals. But sometimes deals that you thought were dead come back when you’ve almost forgotten about them, kind of like Haley’s comet.