Once upon a time a salesperson rushes into the office shouting, "Break out the bubbly because I just closed a sale!" Everyone congratulates the salesperson on their excellent work, knowing the time and effort that goes into each sale.

Over the celebratory handshakes and backslapping, a colleague grills the salesperson, hoping to glean some tricks of the trade. "Who was it?", "How did you do it?", "What was the process?"

Under this friendly cross examination, the successful salesperson brags about how the sales cycle compressed dramatically on this sale.

Successful sales should be celebrated, but sales with ultra-fast closing times should be celebrated cautiously. Certainly some quick closes are smooth and the beginning of a great working relationship; they simply closed fast because the salesperson understood exactly the needs of the prospect, the prospect was already in a mindset to buy, and it was a perfect fit.

But often, a fast-closing sale is like building a house without a foundation. It looks nice, but it simply won’t stand up. If your sale is moving at a brisker-than-usual pace, here are two reasons that the fast sale may be worse than you think:

Reason 1: Perhaps the buyer has no intention of paying. If you perform a service or deliver a product and receive payment after delivery, it’s possible that the buyer needs your offering but doesn’t plan on completing the transaction. Maybe they’ll just keep the product and continue putting off the payment. Or maybe they’ll use the product once – as they intended to do – and then return it to you, claiming that it just didn’t work out for them.

Signs that this is happening to your sale: The client pursues you more than most clients do. It’s a new client without a track record of payment. They make demands for specific delivery dates and hint (or even say) that money is no object.

To combat this, make sure that you are fully qualifying the client, including their ability to pay. Slow down your sales process a little and see how they react. Ask them about when they plan on using your product. Talk about their longer term needs. At the same time, make friends with upper-level staff in the finance department to turn them into allies.

Reason 2: Perhaps the buyer misunderstands what they are getting, when they are getting it, or how much they need to pay. Maybe they’re expecting one thing and think you’re supplying it, but you’re both in for a shock on the delivery date.

Signs that this is happening to your sale: The sales process moves along rapidly and the client seems to agree with everything you’ve said. The client seems fixated on just one feature or benefit or refers to a part of the service rather than the whole.

To combat this, do a test drive. Position it as an early-stage implementation "to make sure that the service is the right fit". Or, if it’s a product and not a service, show it to them (or at least a picture or video of the product). Keep coming back to all of the benefits it offers and make sure that when the client refers to one part you say "yes, but there’s so much more".

Ever wonder why people who have been married for a long time never seem to fight and never notice the other person’s flaws? It’s because they’ve grown accustomed to how the other person thinks and acts. They intuitively adjust for it. And they can read the other person well. That’s the same kind of relationship you build with your clients over time. And fast-closing sales in the early stages are a sign to put on the brakes and evaluate the "opportunity."

People don’t like a lot of cold things – cold food that should be warm, colds and stuffy noses, cold weather; and, of course, cold calls.

A cold call is always an interruption and prospects that are interrupted may not be receptive to your presentation. Like any business person, they have many things on their mind and that means that any cold call – no matter how potentially valuable it could be to their business – is interrupting them from more important matters.

Making matters worse, they don’t know you, they don’t know what you’re selling, and there’s a good chance that they innately feel like you might try to sell them as hard as you can at the first meeting.

So, what makes a cold call so cold? For your prospect, it’s the many unknowns and question marks in their mind while they talk to you. For you, it’s the delicate dance you need to do between selling and not selling, and between keeping it light and not wasting your prospect’s time.

The first thing you’ll want to do is capture the prospect’s attention and set the scope of the conversation. In a sense, your opening line needs to create a promise that you’ll fulfill throughout the rest of your discussion. When cold calling by phone we offer to send literature very early in the conversation. We then ask qualification questions in an effort to make sure we send the correct information. This is very effective in disarming the prospect.

Cold calls are sometimes referred to with disdain. And yet, business gets done because of cold calls; sales are made because of cold calls; businesses grow and innovate with new products and services because someone "made the call".