Planning ahead for "No Surprises" with our new opportunities

Hello Subscriber,

All this week, we’ve looked at different ways to maintain momentum in our sales opportunities.

We’ll finish the week by putting on our “Project Manager” hats.

One of the most important jobs for a professional Project Manager is to ensure that there are “No Surprises” in their projects. How do they do this? They spend a lot of time imagining all of the many ways their projects might fail.

After they’ve identified all of the potential risks to their project, these risks are prioritised and “mitigation strategies” are developed.

What’s the connection to people in sales roles?

Well, it’s our job to be the project manager of the opportunities that we’re seeking to win. And there’s lots that we can learn from the world of professional project management.

Ideally, we will identify all of the risks to our opportunities. We will assign priorities to these identified risks. And we’ll develop mitigation strategies for the most likely risks.

Most Salespeople Are Optimists

One of the key characteristics of effective salespeople is that they have a positive outlook. This positive mindset is clearly an important and highly desirable aspect of how we work with our customers.

Our confidence is often infectious, enabling our customers to have the confidence they need about whether the proposed investments will deliver the outcomes they’re seeking.

But if we are an optimist by nature, it can feel pretty far outside of our comfort zone to ask customers about potential problems with a proposed investment.

“Why might this investment not go ahead?”