Risks to the Sales Forecast must be constantly assessed and analysed on a regular basis, both for probability and severity of impact to the sale.
Three areas described here are: Change drivers for a decision to purchase a new solution; People and power to decide and the Process of the decision.
Change drivers:
- No disruption, organizational objective or regulatory requirement that we can link our solution to or solve
- No business case to show the value we add or the costs that our solution saves
- No budget or our business case is not strong enough to either create budget or take budget away from another spend item
- Other departments, locations or peers use competitive solutions to ours
People & Power:
- No exec sponsorship from an empowered stake holder. No “hero”.
- Single point of failure – only one customer contact (they won’t answer your calls or change their role or leave the customer) or their view on the deal status cannot be triangulated with other customer contacts for accuracy.
- Politics – your supporters are outvoted by non-supporters.
- Do nothing psychology prevails = decision maker uncertainty
- Sponsor has not approved a project of this value or complexity before
- Stakeholders: new ones join, or the original sponsor loses interest – now who owns getting the deal done & what’s in it for them?
- Decision maker, who approved the current system, objects to it being replaced
- No “point person” to work with in a building the business case = no resource assigned
- No one appointed to manage, plan or resource the rollout.
Process:
- Goes “dark” slows down or stops
- Timeline: no deadline, deadline changes/slips, no milestones, no reviews, stuck at one stage for too long
- Excessive requests for information
- Offers of contact with reference customers are ignored
- Scope of project changes
- Competition: an unknown competitor enters the process, or customer spends more time with known competitor/s than us
- Inconsistent responses from stakeholders as to our status
- RFP issued – that we did not write, or a surprise change to an existing RFI
- Consultants get involved in the process
- We did not prove we can integrate with customer’s existing solutions
- Salesperson & Pre-sales (& reseller) not united in objective & priorities
- Manager did not meet the customer at the start, middle or end of the process
- You did not rehearse your “hero” to present your proposal & business case to the decision makers
Looking for more information?
Read our other modules in the Closing Plan Program:
- C.A.P.R.A.® = Closing Action Plan – Risk Assessed
- Seven key factors to closing deals
- Deal coaching: What sales leaders need to know
Or get in touch to discuss how we can leverage our 30+ years of experience in the Information Technology industry to assist with your executive headhunting requirements across EMEA and USA.