Easy For You. Difficult for Your Company.

What is easy for you is difficult for your company.

It’s easy for you to win immature and difficult clients when you don’t have to work with them.

You can choose to tell the prospective client what they want to hear, building the vision of the added value of your solution. You can show them all of the things that are going to be better for them once you take over the business. You can make it sound like they aren’t going to have to change anything and business will become simpler. Easier.

But unless you manage their expectations, deal with their constraints, and gain the commitment to change more than just their supplier, you aren’t doing a good job selling.

It’s easy for you to overlook poor credit reports when you don’t have to collect the money or pay for the line of credit.

When you take zero financial risk by taking on a new client, it is easy to see the risk as acceptable. If you believe that it is outrageous for your company to require a credit report because a prospective client balks at providing the information, let me disabuse you of this inadequate thinking.

If your dream client is uncomfortable providing credit information, you should be uncomfortable selling to them.

It is easy for you to discount when it isn’t your money.

It’s really just an investment in the client, right? Your competitors win deals left and right because their prices are lower than yours, more in line with what the market will bear, you say? You believe that everyone discounts, so you should, too.

Would you pay for the discount with your commissions? Your company has a business strategy, and if the lowest price (operational excellence) isn’t your model, then this is not the way you should be trying to win deals.

It’s easy for you to believe that your company should perform better when you are not responsible for dealing with deep, complicated, systemic challenges.

You wish your company was better operationally. It would be easier for you if you never had service issues, if things worked as they were supposed to, and if you didn’t have to deal with clients who were struggling to get what they need from your team. You believe, mistakenly, that your competitors don’t have these same issues.

Your team isn’t full of poor performers or bad people. Every business has their challenges, and the bigger you are, the bigger—and more complicated—the challenges. Your team is working on it.

Things that are easy for you are more difficult for other people within your company. Complaining about these things isn’t a good choice; doing something to make a difference is the better and more effective choice. Even if that choice is stepping into economic adulthood.