Tough Economy – don’t know how to find opportunities?

You CAN learn how to spot them!

At the moment the economy is feeling difficult.

Interest rates are up. Individuals are feeling the pinch, and are spending less, with a knock-on effect that businesses are finding it tougher to sell.

If you are feeling that you don’t know where to find opportunities, here’s a piece from my Money Tree book.

It’s about knowing how to find new opportunities.

The good news is that opportunities are absolutely everywhere.

I love how Wilbur Smith tells the story of how Centaine handles her challenge. It is wonderful.

The story is analogous to the pain and grief that many companies find themselves in.

Centaine is stumbling along the Skeleton Coast beach in modern day Namibia. On one side is the vast Southern Atlantic Ocean full of salt water which can not be drunk and is patrolled by dangerous sharks. On her other side lies thousands of miles of hot, dry, windswept desert sand.

No water and no food are to be found there either. She is so hungry that she ends up eating a dead fish, which has been washed up on the beach and in the process makes herself sicker and even more dehydrated. She collapses and is dying when a local elderly couple find her.

In the middle of no-where…

An elderly couple. On foot. In the middle on no-where.

These people know how to find water and food.

They are the San, bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.

They dig down into the sand on the beach. A matter of inches below Centaine’s feet are ample sand clams; and they are able to share some water which they stored in a hollowed out, ostrich egg, stoppered with a wooden plug … and so Centaine survives.

… they know.

The elderly couple know the lay of the land and where to find the food sources. Centaine the newcomer, does not. From then on Centaine is neither hungry nor thirsty.

It’s the same with sales in business.

You have to know the environment and look for the opportunities. You have to know what a good opportunity looks like.

If you don’t think that this analogy works, consider how many cars drive around with no lights at dawn and dusk. There are many of them. They are there all the time. They have been there all the time. Yet up to this point, you probably have not thought about it and so they were invisible to you. Yet they are there.

As of now, you will start to see and count them. It is positively dangerous what these unlit drivers do; but they are there never-the-less.

This is the same with sales opportunities. They are everywhere.

You need to train yourself to see them and then act. Taking action is just as important as seeing them.

I have seen some of my clients be handed opportunities on a plate, which they acknowledged as being appropriate for them. However, they did not act fast enough or did not act at all and so the opportunity passed them by. Oops.

Heaven forbid – I have been guilty of it myself. When I first came to Australia, I had a couple of leads for work. Warm leads from a person I knew. Yet I failed to pick the phone up and make the call.

Why? I ask myself now.

Most likely because I did not know what to say. Today I’d most likely say “Hi. My name is Steve Wood, and I was given your number by [name of trusted person who gave the details]”.

Strange as it might seem, that is enough to get the conversation going.

About the Author:

Steve Wood is a management consultant who helps business owners to achieve their own roaring success.  > Read full profile