Selling: Is there ever a single need that makes a business opportunity?

How often have you sat through an opportunity review where there is only discussion about the technical challenges or workscope? You will have probably been guilty of this yourself; I certainly have been. The short answer to the question in the title of this blog is “no”. A technical challenge alone does not make a business opportunity. The reality is that most technical challenges or desire to improve are nuanced, influenced or simply dictated by non-technical factors. Few companies operate efficiently, so why do they need to change now? These other factors have the power to accelerate or kill-off an opportunity, so why don’t sales teams actively look for, and address them in their proposed solution?

Let’s take a step back. In a way, the headline technical challenge or initiative resembles an uncertainty, and just as an uncertainty can exist without being noticed until it impacts the person or people concerned and becomes a “risk”; technical inefficiencies can exist for years until they start to impact a non-technical factor.

So what are these mysterious factors you may ask? For the sake of this blog we will group them into 3 categories. Social factors that impact the individuals involved, Business factors impact results and become visible, and finally political factors that enhance or diminish power and/or control. Only when our technical challenge or improvement comes into contact with one or more of these “imperatives” will a business need exist. Just as we measure risk in terms of impact and probability, a need will become “compelling” the more these imperatives are impacted.

So far so good, but you can be forgiven for asking “I’m a sales rep, not a psychologist; why do I need to identify these imperatives?” So here is the so-what..in fact you can have 2 of them!.

First, these imperatives will dictate whether a potential opportunity goes the distance or fizzles out, If you want to avoid wasting your time on an opportunity going nowhere, look for the imperatives. Secondly, if you want to make your solution resonate with all of the decision-makers compared to your competitors, this is where it happens. The only thing you know for sure is that you won’t find these imperatives in the technical team!

Let me demonstrate this through a story. Earlier in my career I was nominated as project manager of a unique opportunity to form a joint team with a National Oil Company to increase production in one of their major oilfields. The technical workscope and limits were clear, and the team was built and started demonstrating our capabilities. In parallel we negotiated a long-term contract which, to cut a long story short, was never signed. But why not? We were delivering exactly what was asked of us technically, so what went wrong?

It took many conversations and months to work out why this project fizzled out. The reason; we had failed to identify the political imperatives. The initiative was never about the technical targets but about maintaining control in the face of modernization, and developing in-house skills in the face of market liberalization. If we had not built such a successful joint team which delivered this second imperative, our project would have been stopped long before it was. In this instance, the political imperatives acted as an accelerator initially, but then later became a major obstacle when the project came into conflict with them. Had we understood this from the beginning we would have planned and acted quite differently.

Unlike technical challenges which are visible and openly discussed, the imperatives are commonly hidden, and it is for the sales rep to actively seek them out and make them part of his or her solution. Only when you understand the imperatives can you say that you have truly identified the compelling need.

In B2B markets, buying decisions are taken as a response to one or more of the three non-technical factors. As we validate and refine our understanding of the fuller needs of our potential customer we can, as sellers, taylor our offering to address them successfully.