Snakepit
Would you step into this wheat field if you knew there was a cobra in there? No. But the problem is…you won’t know that in most cases. Now, snakes aren’t all bad. Only about 5% are venomous and even they try to avoid you as much as possible.
A problem typically happens when you run into the woods and fields without caution. And when there is a confrontation, that’s a difficult situation.
The same applies to your business and professional decisions - the dynamic business environments are the woods, and your decisions are the patches you run into.
Everyday in your company, many decisions are taken - mostly for common problems like: how to improve employee morale? how to get better credit terms? how much inventory to keep for next quarter? etc.
But a few decisions can have consequences on revenue, profitability and reputation - if they are not handled well.
Here are some business problems we see almost every week:
* You walk into your office on Monday morning and your team member tells you that one of your Gold customer wants to leave. Where should you start and what do you do?
* What do you do when you your sales team tells you that a competitor has just launched a new product, which you have been secretly developing for the last 8 months? (with hundreds of man hours and thousands/ millions of dollars already invested?)
* What do you do when you sense that your accounting books may have dangerous issues that have been overlooked?
* Your star employee wants to leave next month. Where do you start and how should you discuss?
* You have invested weeks in an sales opportunity. Now client says their budget is 10% of your proposal proce. What are your next steps now?
* A client has invited you to propose for a new technology solution along with 3 other vendors. You are the smallest of them with least number of client references. What should be your deal strategy and how to make a winning proposal?
* You are a leading voice in your company’s Board. The CEO wants to retire next quarter, and if you promote the COO, the CFO is likely to leave, and vice-versa. What are your options?
* What do you do if one of your key products is given a bad review in a trade journal?
* It’s Friday afternoon, and an executive from one of your fierce competitors calls you, asking you for a meeting to discuss a joint opportunity! Makes you think: “now what?”
Two things are common across these difficult situations:
(a) you have to do some form of communicate asap and
(b) you may have little idea about it. (its the same for most of us)
Now, it is humanly impossible to be ready for all the situations that can spring up, but it is possible to improve your response and follow-up action by practicing your pitch and proactively watching out for the snakepits.
Here are our business lessons & insights gained from dealing with such difficult business problems.