Chapter three ended with a promise: next steps, and the box on the qualification page that decides whether any of the rest turns into revenue.
Let me start with something that surprises people. Salespeople tell me all the time: I can have great conversations, I can do discovery, I can build rapport, I can pitch. I just cannot close. And my answer is that the closing bit is the easiest part. Closing is not a dark art performed at the end of a deal. Closing is agreed next steps, set every time, on every call. Anyone can do it. What stops them is not skill. It is excitement.
But first, a story about the time I did not buy a car I wanted.
the bmw story
A few years ago I went in to buy a BMW M340i. This was not a browse. The budget was lined up, I had chosen the mod cons, I knew what I wanted.
The salesman was brilliant on the day. He had the black grill fitted. He found my pain point, Apple CarPlay, and demoed it perfectly. I was in heaven.
And then nothing. No next step. Just follow-up emails, days apart. Hi mate, do you want to buy the car? Was it too expensive? Not fast enough?
Here is what happened in my head, and it is the whole chapter in two sentences. On the day, I valued him. He genuinely was really good on the day, understanding my needs for a good period of time before presenting an option. However, with every chasing email, I started to devalue him. I started to think: he must be desperate. I never replied. I kept my old car, because keeping the old car was easier.
One agreed next step. A call in the calendar, a meeting, anything. And I would have bought the car.
why chasing made it worse
This is not just a story about one salesman. There is proper science under it, and it is science every founder should know, because your instinct when a deal goes quiet is to chase, and chasing is usually the thing that kills it.
Psychologists call it reactance, and it has been documented since the 1960s: the more pressure a person feels, the more it intrudes on their sense of freedom, and the less likely they are to act. Even if they wanted the thing to start with. I wanted the car. Every email made me want the conversation less.
Its quieter cousin is choice overload. When the next move is vague, the prospect has to do the work themselves: coordinate their stakeholders, look into the finance options, work out what happens next. Too much open space creates anxiety, anxiety creates avoidance, and avoidance gives them time to talk themselves out of it. Prospects do not go away and diligently progress your deal. They go away and it gets easier to do nothing.
A missing next step cannot be fixed by chasing. Chasing a missing next step is how you turn silence into a no.
why salespeople skip the step
Two things, and they happen in the same moment.
The first is excitement. The call goes well, the buyer is engaged, and your brain declares victory. They are definitely going to buy. So you sign off with the fatal sentence: I will send you a proposal, let me know your thoughts. And you never hear from them again.
The second is time. The demo overran, your technical colleague turned their half hour into an hour, and now there are five minutes left with busy people. Setting a proper next step takes longer than five minutes, so it gets skipped, and everyone leaves the call feeling good about a deal that now has no forward motion at all.
In both cases we jump to what we think is the best action. It is not.
nasa: the next agreed sales action
The fix is the NASA: the Next Agreed Sales Action. Every call ends with one. The last ten or fifteen minutes of every demo are reserved for it, protected like a meeting inside the meeting, never left to chance.
The key word is not next. It is agreed. A next step you set on your own is not a NASA. It is a hope.
the agreed ladder
What counts as agreed? Here is the ladder, and most salespeople live on the bottom two rungs.
"I will call you in a couple of weeks." Not agreed. That is a hope with a date range.
"Would it make sense for us to catch up on this proposal?" "Yeah, sure, sounds good." Still not agreed. Vague assent is not agreement. They have agreed to a concept, not an action.
"OK, how does 3pm on Thursday work for you?" They check the calendar. "That's free." Invite sent. Accepted. Now it is a Next Agreed Sales Action.
The test is simple: a specific action, at a specific time, that both parties have confirmed in their calendars. If it is not in two calendars, it does not exist.
And stack them. A good call often ends with more than one: the proposal review booked for Thursday, and the sample report and customer reference to be sent by tomorrow. Every agreed action is a thread of forward motion, and deals move on forward motion.
never send the proposal
The most common place this discipline dies is the proposal, so here is the rule: never say, "I will send you a proposal."
Instead: we will review the proposal together, live on a call. It is a draft, we will get it right together, and then you can present it internally.
Founders push back on this one. They tell me the customer just wants the price straight away. So we tested it. A client told a prospect they could not give the price right now, and that the next step was a proposal review call. We braced for pushback. The prospect said sure. A month later that same prospect emailed to compliment how well the value had been presented.
The proposal review call does three things at once. It keeps the deal on your calendar instead of in their inbox. It lets you present value with the price, instead of letting a number float free of its context. And it arms your champion to sell internally with your words rather than their memory.
what this means for your team
If you run a sales team, NASA is the easiest discipline to inspect, because it is binary. Look at any deal in the pipeline and ask one question: what is the next agreed action, and is it in both calendars? If the answer is a date, the deal is alive. If the answer is a hope, it is not a deal, it is a wish, and your forecast is a wish list.
And if you are the founder doing the selling, watch yourself for the excitement. The best call of your month is exactly the moment you are most likely to skip the step, because your brain has already banked the win. That is when the discipline earns its keep. Book the next call while you are still on this one. Every time. No exceptions.
Next chapter: trust, and the leap of faith at the end of every deal.
You built something great. Now let's sell it.
James Irving is the founder of Emotive JLI, a sales consultancy for technical founders. He learnt to sell the old school way: 50 cold calls per day in a Manchester boiler room, then enterprise cybersecurity, then ThreatSpike, where he joined as the first commercial person and left with a £10M sales engine. Tell him what you've built or watch the stories.