7 Deadly Sins Destroying Your Win Rates
The original deadly sins were inspired by mankind’s perpetual struggle to rise above their animalistic instincts and rein in the emotions of lust, pride, greed, gluttony, envy, anger, and sloth.
But do you know the 7 Deadly Sins of Business Development?
These 7 Deadly Sins negatively impact your customer’s perception and can prevent you and your team from achieving your revenue and professional goals.
These bad habits in your customer engagement strategy can limit customer intimacy, customer intelligence, discriminators for proposals, and severly impact your PWin and win rates.
By recognizing and avoiding these sins in yourself or your team, you will overcome many of the mistakes of your competitors and quickly stand out from the rest.
In this article we’ll cover:
The single biggest sin committed by BD and Sales professionals is their lack of pre-call planning and preparation. Look at your schedule for next week. How much time do you have blocked for customer call planning and preparation? We’re guessing it’s zero or very little!
Customers can see a lack of planning and preparation, and they know you are winging it. So they mentally disengage and passively participate in the corporate capability briefing or canned presentations knowing there is zero value for them.
At the Hi-Q Group, we say, “If you don’t have a plan, don’t engage!” Great engagement is a derivative of good preparation. On the contrary, unplanned calls usually provide limited customer insights and no customer value, making it almost impossible to secure future meetings with them.
Good preparation requires developing a call plan, understanding whom you are meeting, understanding the questions you will ask, knowing your call’s purpose and goal, and anticipating the next steps. Most of the remaining sins outlined in this article can be minimized with a little pre-call planning.
An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.
– DALE CARNEGIE
In business development, 20 minutes of planning will go a long way to be prepared and feel calm and confident throughout the meeting.
It will help you secure valuable customer human intelligence your competitors likely aren’t getting, and, more importantly, it will help you strengthen your customer relationships, making future engagements easier.
You must learn to control your feelings and not let them control you. Remain anchored in the present focused on the customer and their needs and not your emotions. It would be best to do this regardless of what the customer says or does.
Elite professionals aren’t robots. Of course, they have positive or negative feelings, just like the rest of us, but they know how to compartmentalize them and don’t let those feeling distract them from what matters on a call.
Now that you know the Seven Deadly Sins, your team must avoid these at all costs. And, if we are honest with ourselves, we have all committed one or several of these sins.
But here’s the good news: Building customer rapport and increasing your organization’s customer intimacy is within reach with the right skills and habits. They not only drive organizational growth but improve the culture and morale as well.
Skills such as active listening, empathy, and emotional control are all tools that continue to provide benefits beyond business development.
But the impact on your results will be hard to miss.
A whopping 90% of top performers in the workplace have high emotional intelligence according to a new study by TalentSmart, and the Stanford Research Center found that 85% of job success comes from excellent people skills, while only 15% is attributed to technical skills.
According to a 2023 Deltek report on government contracting, 87% is the win rate on NEW bids and 80% for recompetes for top performers. How do your win rates compare? Teams that excel at customer engagement are also 80% more likely to win competitive bids.
People often believe the ability to create winning relationships™ comes down to a born talent or superficial influences that make it feel unattainable. But it’s simply a set of customer engagement skills that anyone can learn, regardless of their background.
(And that realization gives our students so much confidence!)
Although historically, emotional intelligence training has not been prioritized, 40% of companies now plan to develop their team’s social influence and leadership skills according to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Future of Jobs Report. This is expected to grow as a competitive advantage moving forward.
