Making and closing deals are the bread and butter of your business. However, there is nothing worse than having to clean up after you have made a bad deal that falls apart. Most of the time this could be avoided if we understood how to make mutually beneficial deals, but most people don’t understand how to do that.
Maybe you bid too low on a project or a partnership goes south and there are bad feelings. Either way there are ways that you can evaluate what went wrong in order to avoid making that mistake again. However, there is not a lot of information on creating mutually beneficial outcomes.
If you want to be smart about growing your business then having strong, healthy deals will be an important aspect of growing a stable business. Working with people you enjoy and learning the art of benefiting everyone helps bring opportunities to your business.
Here are 3 tips to help ensure you are closing healthy deals:
Stop trying to hit sales quotas and build relationships: Work to grow your business. If you are building a book of business and need to hit sales quotas, then you are not building long-term relationships with your clients. Instead you will be churning customers. John, a top car salesman in Colorado, has built relationships that provide him with clients, not customers. He builds long-term relationships with clients and they provide him with new clients that buy from him all the time. He is my whole family’s car salesman. He is trusted and I will continue providing him with opportunities to sell cars to my friends. This is how you build a stable long-term business. When you hustle to fill sales quotas, you are working someone else’s agenda, not building a book of business that builds wealth long term.
Create partnerships that are mutually beneficial: This means learning about what is beneficial for each of the partners involved. Maybe profit splits are important to you and maybe time freedom is more important to your partner. When you provide a healthy deal for yourself and your partners, your outcomes are healthy, stronger, and this stabilizes your business quickly. It supports creativity and a healthy culture at your place of business. It makes you popular to joint venture with, thus growing your business long term.
Trust your gut and be willing to say “No”: If your gut says don’t do the deal, and your head is saying, “But we need the money,” you are fooling yourself. Most people who have ignored their intuition and have not followed their gut, (including myself) have regretted it. When you can say no, it puts you in a better position to negotiate or be open for a better client or deal.
Don’t grow an unhealthy business simply because you want to see fast results. Grow a stable business because you are clear about having healthy business dealings. Follow these three tips and you will have long-term success.