Business Coach Tip: How To Find New Opportunities

I often thought running a Venture Capital fund ruined me when it comes to being able to focus on only one company but provides a natural platform as a business coach and mentor.

With that birds eye view in mind, lets use todays topic to help your business grow.

When we believe we know the answer, we unconsciously close ourselves off to other possibilities. If you think this through it makes perfect sense. Lets go through a simplified version of what goes on to getting an answer.

1. You realise you have a question / a problem / an opportunity and you need an answer.
2. You collect data.
3. You analyse the data.
4. You come to a conclusion on the way forward.

At that moment of deciding what you are going to do, naturally your brain knows that there is no need to keep on worrying or assessing this. It can rather get on with other problems, challenges, opportunities and so forth. This is generally all done at an unconscious level.

The opportunity we miss here is if we don’t realise that we have done this and then when we are in a situation where this or a similar topic is discussed we think to ourselves “I don’t need to repeat all the processing here as I know the answer” and we shut down.

Now lets use a different example: say you start a business because you see an opportunity in the market. Off you go and develop your idea and then you start to sell your product or service to potential customers, i.e. your new clients. Now the time between you developing in and approaching the customers is critical – because during this time, things happen and the users might have slightly different needs or better yet even better opportunities have developed.

However if you haven’t kept a watchful eye on the market and listened to what they need, you run the risk of going to each and every sales meeting believing you have the answer and not hearing that the customer’s needs has changed. Often when the client doesn’t say yes our reasons don’t go to “perhaps the need has changed” and how do we adapt our solution to cater for this – we will say “well the client doesn’t get it or we haven’t approached the person with the right influence” – or it costs to much money and so on and so on.

So next time you are selling something, listen to your team, your boss – start observing what they are saying, become curious about what they are not saying, clarify everything and avoid assuming anything. This will help you to develop greater opportunities.

Assumptions are tricky and difficult to pick up. Let me give you an example. You are listening to your potential client say that I often have this problem. Immediately you overlay often with what you see as often. So lets break it into numbers – for you when you say often its daily and for them is actually once a week. Now if you don’t clarify that you can see you become miles apart working off different assumptions.

May you find many opportunities 🙂