Landing Big Sales - When Should You Let Go and Try Later

A painful decision:

As a small-midsize company, some of your attempts at landing big sales will not turn into deals despite your best efforts. In such cases, the best choice is to temporarily abandon this effort and look for other opportunities to go after the big sales. Some small-midsize companies desperately try to salvage the deal by offering incentives and concessions to the buyer even when the buyer is not in a position to move forward. This is a very bad move because it hurts your credibility and set you up to make even more concessions in future deals. More likely trust between the two companies will falter and further business will be difficult.

Though giving up on prospective big sales may be a painful decision for the small-midsize company, it is better to spend your time, energy and resources on companies who have problems they want to fix today.

In order to ensure that you clinch the big sales at the next attempt, your company should do its homework and start preparing itself now. Here are some suggestions that will help in landing big sales.

• Analyze the big sales you have lost this year and identify the probable reasons for your failure, as well as counter-measures to avoid their recurrence.

• Revisit the buyer’s requirements, their buying policies and methods, and other pertinent details.

• Look out for any advance signals that the big company is about to start their buying operations and plan for appropriate action.

• Use Google alerts to monitor changes in the company that signal a chance to re-engage.

• Identify the potential decision makers and other members of the buyers’ purchase team and get as much information about them as possible for eventual use.

Building up confidence levels:

As you start landing big sales it is natural to expand your products, services and capabilities to meet the needs of bigger companies. It is a good strategy to keep big companies you are not doing business with informed about your expanded offerings, capabilities and new clients that demonstrate your expertise and credibility. By sharing relevant information with key contacts you can enhance relationship and see if there are mutual interests worth exploring.

The wrecking crew:

Whenever a smaller company is doing business with a larger company it is important to take adequate precautions to protect the deal from sabotage by other interested parties. The risks will mainly be from three sources:

• The first wrecker will be the current supplier who will be displaced by you. As soon as your new deal is signed and sealed, this supplier will start fighting for regaining his lost business by offering all kinds of promises and concessions to the large company.

• The second wrecker will be from within the large company itself. There will be some disgruntled elements that felt slighted or ignored by the decision makers when the new deal was confirmed and have their own axe to grind.

• The third type of wrecker is other small businesses who are your competitors in the field. They will try to find an entry for themselves in the newly concluded big sales and eat into your business.

You should exercise extreme vigilance and caution to ward off these threats to your business and protect your own interests.