Know why you win; know how you lost
So, why are you surprised? As hard as you work on closing significant sales, you think you might know better. Yet, even as a finalist, you find yourself sweating bullets while waiting to hear if you’ve won the deal.
Certainly, there is room for some uncertainty, when the solution is complex, expensive, risky, or maybe a combination of all three. You can imagine that once the leadership of the customer organization gets together to decide, anything can happen.
You understand the vagaries of group decision making when it’s nearly impossible to personally connect with each influencer; completely impossible to know which influencer’s key criterion is going to not only rule their vote, but also be influential with other votes. For example, if the CIO perceives your software solution as risky in the way it integrates with other applications or systems, how willing is an Operations or Marketing manager to challenge and attempt to over-rule the IT leader?
What if the system does crash? Would you want it on your resume that you got your way simply by pounding the table? Probably not.
This post sounds like a sales process rant; it is not. The gist is to encourage you to amp-up your awareness of how you gather that insight early enough in the process to do something about it. How do you do that?
Give us a call; chances are good that we can help.
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