The 6 Laws of Winnable Deals

In an interview on the Business of Family & Selling podcast, Ken Bohnam breaks down The 6 Laws of Winnable Deals that Lucid Agency in Tempe, Arizona uses to qualify their prospects and forecast revenue.

While it is the job sales professionals to win new business and overcome objections, top-performers know that every minutes spent working a dead deal is time away from closing a winnable deal.

Among The 6 Laws of Winnable Deals you’ll notice themes also found in the more popular BANT and MEDDIC frameworks, but Ken presents them in a way even your newest sales hires will understand.

 

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“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

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Are BANT and MEDDIC Obsolete?

Full Interview: Audio / Video

 

The 6 Laws of Winnable Deals

 

1. Do They Get It?

Does your prospect truly understand their problem and what it’s going to take to overcome that problem?

And this might sound silly, but it’s not uncommon for client companies to see stalled growth simply because they don’t understand the obstacles they’re up against when trying to reach the next level in business.

Without understanding companies end up shopping for solutions that will never provide the result they’re looking for. This ends up being frustrating for both the customer and the provider.

So if there is a disconnect between what the prospective client is asking you to price and what it’s going to take to deliver the desired result, it might be time to move on. If they can’t be brought to understand the reality of their situation in a reasonable amount of time they they are a marketing qualified lead (MQL) at best, not a sales qualified lead (SQL).

 

2. Can They Afford You Easily?

In a world where there is no prize for being the 2^nd lowest priced provider, you want to charge a fair (but preferably premium) rate for the solutions you provide.

However, if your service or solution is going to break the bank before you can deliver the desired result you’ll never reach your destination.

That’s why Ken and his team at Lucid Agency firmly believe that the second of The 6 Laws of Winnable Deals is that the prospect can EASILY AFFORD your offer before trying to do business.

Lucid is in the business of providing performance based, digital marketing services. In doing so they charge their clients on a regular interval over the course of an engagement. That makes this very different from selling a luxury watch for example.

If the goal of buying a watch is to give confidence to the person who wears it, the goal is achieved as soon as the purchase is made and the watch goes on the buyer’s wrist.

The buyer is also not required to pay for that feeling over and over again, they now own it. So even if the initial purchase is a bit of stretch, it probably won’t impact the buyer’s ability to pay for other things over the next few months.

In a B2B transaction like that of marketing services, where the desired results can’t always be realized as instantaneously as purchasing a luxury watch, pricing that causes the buyer to feel stretched financially can make reaching the desired result impossible.

Why?

Because the likely outcome is that the client will pull the rip cord on services and stop making payments before any meaningful work can be achieved.

So before getting yourself into such a bind, heed the lesson we learned from Matt Owens, “Not every suspect is a prospect.”

If the potential buyer can’t afford your offer EASILY it’s more likely that things will end in broken promises, hurt feelings, lost investments, and missed revenue rather than in success.

If the prospect can’t afford your offer they are better defined as a suspect than a prospect.

 

3. Do They NEED It?

Is there an economic impact?

If your offer is a Nice To Have in the life of a particular prospect as compared to a Have to Have, your biggest competitor isn’t another company. Your biggest competitor will be the dreaded no-decision.

That’s not say you win absolutely zero business from clients who think your offer is a Nice to Have, but be warned. You’re also likely to lose the account when their budget gets squeezed.

Don’t bet your quota on closing the Nice to Have opportunities in your pipeline.

 

4. Are They Willing to Work With You?

A lot of B2B buyers will know that adoption of a product – especially software – is a huge concern. The person within an organization with the authority to buy may not even accept a demo from a vendor until after the person whose day-to-day will be most impacted by the sale – the end user – expresses interest in the product or service.

In this interview Ken shares a story in which Lucid closed a sales. The customer had the need, they understood how the solutions solved the problem, and they could afford the solutions easily.

BUT – The deal fell apart just a few months later because the person within the client company that Lucid’s team had to interface with couldn’t be pleased. This key person within the client company felt threatened and didn’t play well with Lucid’s personnel.

In some cases a client just can’t be pleased. Some will intentionally and knowingly attempt to inflict scope-creep on the vendor, to get more than they paid for.

And some people are just unpleasant, which can ultimately suck the margin out of a deal when it comes time to implement a service.

In the particular case Ken mentions, the end-user wasn’t a part of the sales process and didn’t get a chance to weigh in on the set of services Lucid was contracted to perform.

Had they been brought into the discovery phase of the sales process, Lucid may still have this account.

Because including all the stakeholders during the sale process allows them to weigh in on what service you end up recommending. At the very least the end-users are more likely to feel invested in the scope of service, instead of threatened and dead-set on killing the initiative.

 

5. Are They Legitimate and Ethical?

This one can be subjective.

Of course, if your organization has a clearly defined set of values and you hire members of your team in alignment with those values, you need to sell in line with them as well.

Failing to be congruent can impact the morale of your team. Your sales force – as well as other employees – base their loyalty to your organization on the vision you sold them on during recruitment and the commitment to that vision you demonstrate.

When it comes to qualify deals based on a prospect’s ethics Ken suggests you go with your gut. Because if a prospect isn’t being honest with you it’s hard to build a solid business case for the sale.

You can’t properly match needs to services and budgets if what a prospect tells you isn’t the truth. For this reason you shouldn’t be betting you’ll hit your sales goals based on winning the business of a less than honest prospect.

 

6. Do You Have an In?

There can be a lot of red-tape when it comes to B2B sales and even more when you sell to the government.

But buying decisions are still made by people and people make decisions emotionally, based on a criteria of KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST. This happens well before they build a logical case to justify their decisions.

Having a rock solid business case for why your offer is a Have to Have, that buying from you will either MAKE or SAVE the client a significant amount of money, always increases your chances of winning the business.

Of course, you’re business case is worthless if you don’t achieve an emotional buy-in from your prospects.

That’s why Ken doesn’t suggest companies blindly respond to Requests For Proposals (RFPs). It is far more likely you’ll close the sales if you were part of the needs discussion prior to RFP being released.

These kinds of pre-RPF discussions give you the opportunity to build KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST with stakeholders. This is how you gain your “In.”

Whereas if you’re blindly responding RFPs that were influenced by competitors, you’re trying to fit yourself into their box. You’ve allowed your competitor to write a set of rules in their own favor.

Instead, you should be trying the write the rules in your own favor and putting more focus on winning the deals in which you were part of the pre-RPF discussion.

In most cases, the process of soliciting bids from multiple vendors is a formality to ensure the buyer isn’t getting bamboozled – that your price is fair. By the time an RFP is released the buyer is already pretty certain who they want to buy from.

Among all the red-tape there is almost always a way that a buyer can justify buying from their first choice. Even if they’re not the lowest price bid.

Of course, top-performers know that and will educate their buyer on how to do this along the way.

Full Interview: Audio / Video

 

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