Time Kills All Deals

Perfect Pace and Steady Process

How timing is everything in landing complex sales

The Rolling Stones might have declared that “time, time, time is on my side,” but time is NOT on the side of the whale hunter!  Dangers are associated with moving too quickly and too slowly through the sales process.  What to do?  Maintain the proper pace.  Here’s how.

In the movie Speed, Sandra Bullock is aboard a bus that must maintain a constant speed. If the bus goes too fast or too slow, a bomb will be triggered, killing all on board.

Complex business deals are often equally dangerous and out of control. Sometimes the buyer is attempting to purchase services faster than you can sell. Other times, the process has stalled and a deal may not occur at all. Whether it is too fast or too slow, each offers a series of challenges for the harpooners and village.

Nothing makes a harpooner happier than when the client says “yes” and punctuates that affirmation with a signed contract. However, from time to time, your buyer wants to begin the relationship before you are ready to fulfill the sale. Particularly in the case of complex business deals, a client’s urgency can outstrip its capacity to perform at a high level of excellence.

The risks associated with the “fast yes”:

• An inability to develop a proper plan for implementation
• Lack of operational capacity
• An insufficient or underdeveloped scope of work leading to substantially changed orders or missed opportunity
• A bias to bypass pre-sale processes including credit checks, use of a target filter, and completed estimating
• A disenfranchised operational team due to lack of sufficient time for proper “buy-in”
  
  

Good harpooners have a sense for when business deals have stalled. But often harpooners underestimate the risk of this behavior and do not properly adjust tactics.

If a deal begins to stall, you are vulnerable to these risks:

• Members of the boat can become disinterested and sloppy in their execution of the sales process
• The client organization may have objections that it is unwilling to share, causing follow-up to be inappropriate to the client’s real needs
• You may give in to a tendency to push the process by offering discounts or overselling
• A stall can be perceived prematurely as a “no” and the boat can disband out of a false belief that a deal is no longer possible
• The parameters of the initial pricing may change and now the organization has either bid unprofitably or the bid is no longer competitive

Keeping your eye on the “proper pace”

The Whale Hunters Process™ focuses on closing big deals. Proper pace is important in creating business deals that work for both parties. Too fast, and it is likely the sales organization will be burned or the client will be underserved. Too slow, and the likelihood to close falls at a startling rate or the organization’s inclination to overreach manifests itself.

Ideally, pace is something that you anticipate and control through multiple steps:

Step 1: Agree on the sales process. As basic as this may sound, many organizations fail to inform their prospect as to how the process of their business deals should move forward. Or the client may present a timeline that you fail to question or to verify their intent.

Step 2: Write the process down and share it with your client, including timelines. Putting things in writing does not always guarantee compliance in business deals. However, the gentle reminder of a written document, appropriately shared in both organizations, creates an implied sense of obligation unless challenged at inception. It also notifies the client of your schedule for acceptance of the opportunity, avoiding the possibility of the client jumping the gun.

Step 3: Validate each step and foreshadow as you go along. In The Whale Hunters Process™, each significant movement is tracked, measured, and validated. Work with the prospect to confirm the completed step and immediately follow up with the next anticipated milestone.

Step 4: Promptly renegotiate missed dates. Often a client will move back the timeline, and say, “I am not sure when we will get to the next step.” A good harpooner will not let this go at face value. Real questions like these will have to be answered throughout even the best business deals:

• “Will the project still occur?”
• “Will your organization be re-bidding this project?”
• “Have you narrowed the field, and how do we stand?”
• “What can we do to be helpful during the interim while you still have this need but no agreed-upon solution?”