Risk is a big part of the sales game these days. Chris Scirpoli writes “Have you thought about how you are minimizing your prospects risk? Are you even taking into account the fact that they are assessing very carefully the risk of every decision they make?
When the wallets start to tighten up and companies stop hiring and start firing; you’re prospect is going to be very risk averse. Look at it from the perspective of the client – maybe the incumbent doesn’t have incredible customer service but it’s serviceable.”
Maybe they are more expensive, less knowledgeable and their product/service doesn’t offer as much benefit as yours but they are at least getting the job done. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you can do it better, faster, cheaper with no down time and higher levels of customer service. Here’s why – The vendor they don’t know and don’t have experience with could be much, much worse than the vendor they do know and kind of like.
Do your Sales Tactics Manage Risk Better than your Competition?
As a salesperson, now more than ever, you must become not only a manager of expectations, persuasive and provide more value but you must also manage risk much better than your competitors.
Who else is at Risk?
Let’s look at another situation; the prospective client doesn’t like the incumbent. They are putting out an RFP to pick their next vendor. You enter into the RFP with high hopes. You put together a good proposal, build a good relationship with your contact and make the final round, but are shielded from the decision maker until the last meeting. In almost every case like this you’ve already lost. Here’s why, the decision maker is talking to someone, it’s just not you. They went out and got a recommendation from their friend/brother/colleague/whoever that they trust.
That recommendation gives your competition a direct competitive advantage over you. The trust of the referrer is carried with them, pretty much common sense, right? Except you put all this time and effort into the deal, you told your VP/Sales Manager/CEO that you guys had a great shot at this and convinced them to put company resources into competing for the deal. You put your neck on the line and the deal didn’t go through.