Is the Juice Worth The Squeeze?
(and a quick video with more details)
✨Today’s Slattery Sales tip: Story time!
Once upon a time, a company (one of our clients, but this was before we worked together) sold fin-tech solutions to municipalities to help them process payments.
One of their sellers decided to target a major prospect: a large city whose antiquated systems for local tax processing required an entire basement room full of clerks penciling manual calculations on physical paper. ✏️📝✏️
If the perennially cash-strapped city – whose calls for additional funding regularly made headlines – decided to adopt our client’s solution with annual costs totaling in the low six figures, they’d free up millions of dollars every single year. 💵💰💵
It seemed like a total no-brainer; an easy win. Early conversations went well. Everyone agreed it made sense. They told the seller, “This is awesome, we’re very interested, and I think my counterpart in this other department should see it, too, so they can weigh in on it.” They loved the product demos. They loved the innovation. They loved the idea. 💡🤓💡
The seller, being apparently so close to the end of the sale, had this opportunity in the forecast at high confidence. 📈
However, this major prospect demurred and delayed the decision. They hemmed and hawed for months! The salesperson was a skilled pest, though, and finally – after months of pestering – the highest-ranking player in the cast of characters provided the seller some clarity:
“Listen: your solution makes so much sense, and we love it. It would free up so much cash, and I wish we could buy it. But NO ONE here wants to be the person who causes fifty unionized municipal employees to lose their jobs.”
😲
Yes, it might have made rational sense, in the big picture, to bring the city’s processes into the 21st-century (or even the 20th), but no individual stakeholder was ready to stick their neck out and make it happen; that was death-threat territory. Way too risky.
So:
➡️ In every opportunity, ask yourself:
❓From the prospect's perspective, is the juice worth the squeeze?
They may love your solution. They may love the idea. They may want what you have.
But you’re not selling in a vacuum. You’re up against the status quo. And sometimes, there’s a lot of weight invested in the status quo.
This is what we mean at Slattery when we ask, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
❓Is the change (to your solution) worth the pain of change?
It might not be.
Be ruthlessly honest about the opportunities in your pipeline. Is the juice worth the squeeze?
From the prospect’s perspective?
If not, then it may not belong on your forecast.
~
✨ Thank you for stopping by! Glad to have you here. ✨
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