Test Your Deal with These 3 Questions

This is a simple way to pressure-test opportunities before they waste time.

Don't forget to check out last week's top tip: The Most Important Word in Sales!

For more strategies like this, check out my sales tip video library on YouTube...

If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

When I dissect opportunities one on one with a salesperson, I look at three things immediately.

One, how many stakeholders are engaged in the process? Is value quantified and agreed to by the salesperson and the stakeholders? And two is the qualification period compared to when a proposal was sent out long enough to justify a truly qualified lead. Or in other words, did we get to proposal really quickly relative to the average length of sales cycle?

If there's too few people engaged, then I fear that we don't have a good understanding of the whole picture. We don't know who who's going to really receive value from this proposal. We don't know who the decision makers are, and we've probably left a red flag or an antique coach, or someone who doesn't want us to win at risk of sabotaging the deal. If value, having been, hasn't been quantified and agreed to by the buyer. And we're probably selling features and not benefits. And if we went to proposal two quickly, we didn't ask enough questions.

Now an X mark beside any one of those three is going to show that the deal is weak. It might not sabotage the whole deal, or you might not be at risk of losing the whole deal, but it does mean that we have to take a step back and correct the problem. Obviously, if there's an X mark beside 2 or 3, then the deal is not ready for a proposal at all and we need to go backwards. But just those three pieces of analysis will show you the risk associated with losing this piece of business. And of course, the bigger the risk, the less likely you're going to win.