5 Root Causes of Stalled Opportunities

I sometimes get into a debate with my son when I am trying to coach him on schoolwork. Most of these discussions end with my son replying, “I know, Papa, but leave it to me. I just want to learn from my mistakes. That’s how I really understand how to improve, and then the learnings stick with me better”. I think this is a courageous approach. In my school days, you just learned the correct answers and memorized them for a day to get a great mark the next day on the test. Unfortunately, I forgot 50% of what I had learned a few weeks later.

What does this have to do with stalled opportunities?

Recognizing the cause of things

Learning from mistakes is an excellent approach to better understanding the cause of things. Research tells us that the most significant advantage is that this approach increases confidence. The more confident you feel, the better you can handle similar future challenges.

When opportunities stall, understanding the possible root causes will help you with how to fix and eventually how to prevent getting into these situations. Your opportunity confidence level increases. So, here we go, the five root causes of Stalled Opportunities:

1 You Go Too Fast

Your questions, statements, and input in the customer conversation move faster than your customer can handle. The result: the customer is still in Why (should I) Change!, while you are already in Change to What it and Change to Who? This causes a disconnect and the customer switches off.

Learning: Opportunities stall because you go too fast. Instead, you must slow down and ensure you are at the right place with your customer. In simple words, when your customer is in Why Change?, you have a Why Change conversation. When the buying room moves to Change to What?, they must discover the solution criteria needed to make the business idea in Why Change? work.

2 You Missed Hidden Competitor(s)

While you are hoping for your contact to get back to you agreeing to your proposal, somewhere in the customer’s organization, there is a stakeholder or stakeholders you have missed to involve: the hidden competitors. When they get engaged late in the buying process, they can ignore opportunities and risks and direct others NOT to further pursue the conversation with you. That’s when opportunities run into a dead end.

Learning: Opportunities stall because you have not made Hidden Competitors part of the buying room. Instead, identify who is involved early in the buying process and get these stakeholders interested.

3 You Have SME Conversations Only

The challenge many salespeople have is limiting their conversations to subject matter experts in the customer organization. For example, you talk to IT people if you are an IT salesperson. Accounting software salespeople talk to Finance people. Logistic Salespeople talk to Logistics people. These customer contacts may get you a meeting with their manager, so you go up vertically in the organisation. But, if you want to sell from the buyer’s perspective, you must go horizontal in the customer’s organization. Bringing business growth ideas needs to be heard by managers with revenue ownership functions like Sales & Marketing. Bring your business acumen and discuss how your business idea impacts the top and bottom lines.

Learning: Opportunities stall because you do not enable your functional stakeholders to take your ideas to functions with revenue responsibility. Instead, digitally enable them to get your message across to other functions.

4 You Focus on Your Competitor

This is a common mistake in modern selling, and it is easy to get trapped in comparing yourself to your competitor. Doing so doesn’t add enough value for a customer to change. The difference is too small for a customer to switch. In their world, you are all the same. On the other hand, you sometimes get unwillingly dragged into such conversations. Being aware that, in a discovery conversation, you first need to let the customer discover that a change is required to the benefit of their top and bottom line. Then, they become interested in what exactly needs to change. A focus on your competitor soon becomes a tactical conversation.

Learning: Opportunities stall because you only focus on comparing yourself to your competitors. In most cases, all you have done is give the customer something to compare with to test the market. Instead, focus on solid “Why Change?“ and “Change to what?“ conversations where the customer discovers business ideas and the business benefits of changing. These are strategic discovery conversations and add more value to the stakeholders.

5 You Fail to Discuss ‘The Risk of Not Changing’

When selling from the buyer’s perspective, salespeople often focus on principles like FOMO linked to a business growth opportunity. Although this is a great strategy and will get the stakeholders’ interest, your opportunity frequently stalls because, on its own, the ‘missing out on’ business opportunity is not clear or big enough to decide on. When you only focus on benefits for the customer, you miss out on a more impactful decision enabler. Discuss the risk of not changing. If applied well, this triggers different emotions in your customers. A while ago, I wrote a blog post about this phenomenon via a story: What if doctors could sell?

Learning: Opportunities stall because, in your discovery conversations, you let your customer discover only the opportunity that can be gained when changing. The delta value of what the customer could gain versus what they have now is not big enough. Instead, make sure you also let your customer discover the risk of not changing. The delta value increases because the perception of the current state decreases.

Prevention is Better than Cure

Review your stalled opportunities. Do you recognise any mistakes you made regarding the above five root causes? That’s good because now you understand how to improve and be more confident in not making these mistakes. Your next challenge is not to fix stalled opportunities but to prevent them from happening. Prevention is better than cure.

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