“Customer value and unique selling points are bringing you through the door of the customer, risk mitigation is closing large deals.”
When you’re creating an offer, make sure that you identify the risks proactively, instead of letting your customer do it. Build in the risk mitigation into the offer instead of navigating around the possible risks of doing business with your organisation.
Introduce risk mitigation workshops and make sure that you’re not trying to sell your product or service during these meetings above and during the workshops.
Put yourself in the buyers shoes
By putting yourself in the shoes of your potential buyer and asking yourself the following questions, it will gauge their level of trust in you, the organisation, and the offer.
- Capability – Does this vendor and the allocated team (your organisation and your team) have the right qualities to deliver what they promise?
- Vision – Does this vendor have a strong vision of the future? (here, you can also think that – would you ever want to deal with an organisation that haven’t got a good vision of the future?). By comparing the history with the present and with facts to back it up, you’ll become more credible.
- Honesty – Can I trust that this vendor is telling the truth, and when things don’t go well, they will solve it? (back this up with real cases where you’ve failed or met obstacles, tell the customer how you identified it, how you solved that problem, and how your team turned it around, into success. Be honest, this will increase the credibility as well.)
- Consistency – Does the vendor have the capability and honesty to deliver the same results over a long period?
It’s incredibly important to bring forth your organisation’s credibility, show possible awards if your organisation has received any, show media coverage, and leader endorsements. Show the client that your organisation puts honesty and integrity at the top of the shelf, show them reference cases of previous and current clients that struggled and how your company helped them turn it around, and how you solved the issue.
In his Nobel Prize-winning research on loss aversion, Daniel Kahneman concluded that humans have an on average 2.5 times stronger drive to avoid pain than to achieve pleasure.
Sales and marketing people are taught to talk about the upsides, USPs, and benefits of the service or product that they’re selling. Instead of focusing more on mitigating risk, they focus on promoting the value and upside of making a deal with their organisation.
To put everything stated in an example that most people can relate to:
You’re going to travel abroad and need to book a hotel, before doing so, you’re looking at ratings of the different hotels, as well as the reviews by previous customers. You’re checking previous experiences by previous hotel guests, especially the bad comments, to see if the strengths of the hotel outweigh the weaknesses or vice versa.
Can you accept the flaws? A flaw can be that the restaurant is bad or far away from the beach. But on the other hand, the beds are amazing, the hotel rooms are fresh, and there are no insects. The pool area is great.
The same way you need to think when you’re engaging in a deal. Does the vendor’s strength outweigh its weakness? What happened with previous clients/customers, are they happy?
Are you interested in learning more about the Megadeals Discipline? Get a copy of the #MEGADEALS book or contact us here for information on how to implement the discipline within your entire organisation.
Have a great day!
