An all to common outcome of sales opportunities is the decision to “do nothing” or stick with the status quo. Much has been written lately about the rising number of “stakeholders” involved in complex sales situations along with “FOMU” (fear of messing up) as detailed in the book The Jolt Effect by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna.
But there’s another factor frequently missed by salespeople: Is the problem significant enough, to the people who count, to warrant investment in solving it? Said another way, is it a priority amidst the other pressing issues (and investment opportunities) facing the real decision maker(s)?
The seller might do a good job determining that the prospect fits the Ideal Customer Profile and has expressed a desire to solve a problem that is in the sellers wheelhouse. They may might even understand how a decision is made and where the money will come from.
So they invest the time and effort to create a proposal. And often that means not just their own time, but their support/technical resources to design the “solution” too.
Then they present the proposal to the contact they’ve been working with, only to hear something from the prospect like “our priorities have shifted”, “we’ve decided to hold on this for now”, “I couldn’t get the budget approved” or some other variation of “no thanks”.
So what did the salesperson miss? Where did they go wrong? While these situations are sometimes unavoidable, often they’ve put the cart before the horse. They didn’t dig deep enough in the discovery conversations to determine the severity and impact of the issue at hand, with all the key stakeholders, before investing the effort in designing a solution and proposal.
- The impact it is having on the organization (e.g. downstream functions), not just the immediate individual or group;
- The consequences of not solving it (to the organization, not just one stakeholder), and also the urgency to solve it now;
- The priority that solving this problem holds vs. other competing priorities facing senior level stakeholders (decision makers).
So now the selling organization has sunken (read wasted) resources on a deal that really was suspect from the start. Sellers need to have the right conversations and gain consensus with all the people who matter in the decision to not only identify the “pain”, but also determine it’s scope, severity and urgency to resolve. And if they can’t accomplish this, it is likely that they’ve spent precious resources (people, time and money) with no return.
