How To Maximize Your Margin On Every Deal.
An old Swedish couple is enjoying dinner in a rustic log cabin restaurant in northern Minnesota on a cold winter evening.? They’re celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary.? Just before the desert, the wife kicks the husband in the shins under the table. ?
“What was that for?”, he grimaced. ?
“That was for 30 years of bad sex”, she quips. ?
He then kicks her in the shins. ?
“What was that for?”, she winced.?
“Knowing the difference”, he smirked.
Knowing the difference, hmmm.? Smacks of what wisdom is.? It’s not knowledge. Technically, it’s the ability to connect dots in meaningful ways.? That’s why there are no young sages.? Sage advice is gained from doing, and doing takes time.? Those who do can proffer wiser words.?Those who don’t mostly offer hollow advice.? I prefer pearls polished by life’s grittiness.
Contemplating this reminds me about making assumptions.? We all make them, shaping them from expectations and experience.? It’s in our nature, but it’s also in our nature to make blind mistakes.? Because the totality of what we know is incomplete.? Bill Shakespeare is brilliant, a fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. ?
No fool, my dad’s assessment of making assumptions is pure gold: assume makes an ass out of u and me.? Sound guidance with a huge upside, always.
An assumption’s accuracy is always on a sliding scale, ranging from ridiculous to spot on.? Being spot on typically is less luck than churning a boatload of possibilities into a formidable educated guess.? This is where experience comes in handy.
I recently sat in on a sales deal post-mortem whose objective was to glean ways to maximize future best possible outcomes.? Various management, operations, marketing, and sales perspectives sat around the table.? But the sales perspective was the most interesting dive.? Why?? Because the sales team made wrong assumptions.? Potentially squelching a desirable deal, the buyer posed a simple, common question, is this your best price?
The salesperson immediately jumped to the conclusion, the buyer wants a lower price.? But what if the buyer was:
Thankfully, the seasoned seller didn’t default to offering a better price, they responded with, “What makes you say that?”? The buyer then asked about add-ons.? Whew!? Deal saved, margin taken off the chopping block.
Cultivating assumption awareness pays big dividends.? Exchanging assumptions with questions is clarifying.? Before submitting to your assumptions, keep asking. As in this deal, “What makes you say that?”, cemented the closing.
?A reflection.
The Chinese Farmer Parable
Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse returned, bringing seven wild horses with it. That evening, everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses. While riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”?
The world isn’t always what we think it is, colored by thoughts we carry that may or may not be faithful to our fruitfulness.? Accordingly, questioning our possible responses, to create more favorable outcomes, means we must become observers of our worldviews. ?
Maybe assuming there are more options than you think is the only correct assumption.