Where Are You Vulnerable?

Their are threats to your opportunities. Some threats are internal threats and within your control. Other threats are external. All have to be considered. Looking at your opportunities to understand where you are vulnerable provides you with a chance to do something about them–before it’s too late.

Have You Followed Your Sales Process?

Your sales process outlines what you need to do to successfully move an opportunity from target to close. If you follow your sales process, your best practices for stacking the deck in your favor, you improve the likelihood of winning your opportunity.

If you don’t follow your sales process, all of the tasks, activities, and commitments your sales process outlines and that you neglected put your opportunity at risk. It makes you vulnerable to the internal threat of doing poor work.

You can eliminate this threat by making sure you do what is necessary to stack the deck in your favor, including following your sales process.

Does Your Solution Create Enough Value to Be Chosen?

Regardless of what your sales process requires, you have to develop a solution that helps your dream client achieve their necessary outcomes. The greater the value that you can create, the greater likelihood of your winning the opportunity.

The less value you create, the more likely that your dream client will chose a competitor who creates more value. Your sales process helps define how you create value at each stage of your sales process and the buyer’s buying process.

It takes a professional, business-acumen-possessing salesperson to interpret what they hear from their dream client, to make the right choices, and to take the right decisions to deliver.

You minimize your vulnerability by learning to create an unassailable value proposition and solution with your dream client.

What Do You Fear?

One of the best and fastest ways to expose your own vulnerabilities is to identify the threats to a deal. Is it something you missed in your sales process? Is it some inability to create value better than your competitors?

Is there something you are afraid your dream client will ask you that will expose an area of weakness? Or is there something that you hope your competitor doesn’t use a decision criteria? Or maybe you fear a competitor that has the deep relationships that you wish you had. Just asking the question, “What are you afraid of?” can elicit an actionable answer.

It’s arrogant to believe you have a deal won before the deal is actually won. Until that time, you do well to review your opportunities, expose your vulnerabilities, and to do something about them before it is too late.

Questions

In what areas are you vulnerable to competitive threats?

How do you review your opportunities to uncover your vulnerabilities and the things that put your deals at risk?

What risk do you encounter when you don’t follow you sales process and stack the deck in your favor? What happens when you skip the steps that help you and your dream client build the right solution?

How do you ensure that you create enough value to beat your competitors? How do you level the playing field against larger and better-financed competitors?