Episode 93: Closing More Deals at the "Pointy End' of the Year

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And engaged teams, stronger sales Teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. We are officially in the sprint to Christmas. It's mad. Traffic is worse, tempers are a little bit shorter than they were many months ago, and without question, the majority of sales teams that I'm working with at the moment are focusing right now on closing out their sales for 2025. Typically, this presents a fantastic opportunity for businesses to really come forward with some great offers for their customers to ensure that their books are nice and tidy and we're going to roll into a really positive next 12 month period. @ the same time though, it can lead to an awful lot of frustration, particularly among sales leaders and leaders of businesses when deals that we expected to close simply don't quite get there. In my 23 years in the sales industry, I have never seen a truer period than the month of November and the month of December to really identify the strength of the of a business's pipeline. And the reason I say that is it's the time when a lot of the promises made by salespeople and by prospects, and let's be fair that the promises made by salespeople, they are often reflective of what their customers have said to them and not always embellished into perhaps glass half full types of approaches. This period of time really starts to test just how robust pipelines of a business are. What it can often lead to is a bit of a clean out when we come into the start of the following year because we recognize that our pipelines aren't actually as strong as we thought and invariably what comes with that is a greater focus on lead generation. But it also at times brings in little surprises, little pockets of projects where we didn't necessarily expect them to come forward now and close out. But Fantastically they do. So today, what I would like to talk through is is just how we make sure we bring to a close our open pipelines at this time of year. And for me to do that, I think the best way we can articulate it is through the negotiation frameworks that have worked for me over those 23 odd years of sales and contracts and business negotiation. Because I'm a very firm believer of what's worked for one, we'll work in the same form or a varied form for many, many others out there. So today's all about sharing some of the practices that have worked for myself and for my teams and for those around me, in the hope that some of these principles might help your teams in the coming weeks as we roll into Christmas. So for this approach today, I'd like to focus on three areas around negotiation or broader negotiation frameworks. The first one we're going to look at is all around really understanding what what it takes to get a deal closed. And when I say the words needs analysis, I'll often and I can see some eyes rolling on the other end of this podcast, I'll often receive some feedback that says we do that really well. We really understand what the customer wants before we put our proposals together. And it's at that point in time that I'll really start to probe just how well a business or an individual person understands their customer needs. The reason I say that is because as salespeople, we often want to move as quickly as we can through a process without feeling like we're necessarily wasting customers times or in particular making them feel like we're using up too much of that time so they don't necessarily want to choose us as their chosen provider. We're often really reluctant to ask that extra question for fear of upsetting the customer. We're often really reluctant to ask that extra question because we're not quite sure what to ask ask. And we're often really reluctant to ask who the decision makers are because again, we don't want to upset that prospect on the other end or find out that we've been working through a process only to recognize or to realize that the person we're dealing with isn't making those decisions. So I'd say that it's often not a premeditated lack of needs analysis that results in us not understanding what our customer wants, but in fact it's habits that have been built into us over a very long period of time that don't encourage us to really spend as long as we can talking with our customer about what they actually want. So for me, when I'm approaching needs analysis or working with teams that I see do this really, really well, there's a few things that they have in common that other businesses don't necessarily have. The first one is very, very simple, and that is a predetermined set of questions that. That they can ask at every single customer appointment. Yeah, it's really basic. Yeah, it seems like we'd be taking a step back to write out a set of questions that, yeah, might actually remove a feeling of empowerment from our salespeople. But the flip side of this is if you don't already have it, how do you know the impact that it's gonna make to your team without trying it? If you don't already have it, or if you haven't already spoken to your team members about it, how do we know that it's going to disempower them? How do we know a lot of these assumptions that we're making about writing a list of qualifying questions are true? And that's a conversation I've had with many sales leaders over the course of this year and years prior. And what invariably has come out of that is that we have a fear of creating scripts for our salespeople, or a fear of really disempowering their ability to use their own personality in this process. But what we haven't asked is whether or not they'd appreciate actually having some guidance when it comes down to asking needs analysis questions. And most commonly, what I find come back from sales leaders and sales teams is that salespeople are so grateful to have a list, a checklist of questions that they can ask to customers to help guide them during that process. Because at the end of the day, whilst we like to have our own personalities shine through in sales, we also like to be able to have some certainty and some constant processes that we can follow that make our jobs easier. And I think one area that's often overlooked is that upside that can come from asking really good questions to qualify our customers. The next part of this is really understanding about who's making the decision. And whilst I often see salespeople and teams come back with a list of decision makers, what commonly is missed here is that we've only received from one of those decision makers what the key buying criteria are. Where we've missed is from the alternate decision makers, what's important to them. And whilst most of the criteria often overlap, once we get across all decision makers, it's those extra. Those last Couple of decision making criteria that can become really powerful to helping us craft a proposal that works for our customer. So not only do we need to make sure we're spending time in needs analysis, but we also need to make sure we're asking the right questions. And generally that's through a standardised set of questions and getting to all the decision makers that are part of the process. And the final piece here around the needs analysis is that trial closing. And often trial closing is thought about as being solely around price. But for me, where I've seen really successful sales teams nail this process is that they talk about trial closing being around a broader offer. So the example here is to play back all of the decision making criteria that you've gone through and confirm with the customer what success looks like. So if the decision making criteria includes ROIs, a certain percentage payback per year, fantastic. We can confirm. We can confirm, Mr. Customer, if we're coming back with an ROI of 25%, so that's a payback of four years, is this likely to get approval through your board or senior decision makers? Fantastic. Where this can extend though is those other criteria that are really important. Mr. Customer, when we're talking about maintenance for your project, can I confirm that if we're to come back with a proposal that includes maintenance for the next five years and a warranty that supports that, that this is likely to tick off the risk elements of your decision with your senior leaders or decision making criteria, such as payment terms. If we're looking to have payment terms spread out over a 12 month period as we deliver stages of this, with 30 days, end of month payment terms, can I confirm that that's likely to meet the decision making criteria that you need to within the business? And this can really extend into sustainability goals. It can extend into broader procurement processes around needing to make sure that there are modern slavery requirements within a business. It can extend into things like making sure that your supply chain is shored up, that you have liquidated damages included in your proposal, that you have bank guarantees, that you have all the broader requirements that impact a decision over and above just price, and by soft closing those early on in the piece, and that's during the needs analysis phase. What it allows us to do is create proposals that tick off as many of the decision making criteria as possible from the start, so that once we get to the close or once we get to the pointy end of that project, we, we don't need to work through some unintended or some hidden criteria to get that deal. Done. So that's number one that has worked unbelievably well and I would say is the most powerful negotiation framework or negotiation principle that I've seen. Great teams roll out, get everything out on paper early. The second piece here is a tangent to the needs analysis and it's around pricing and there's lots and lots of chatter in the global marketplace, always has been, always will be around when the best time to bring up prices. Well, for me and for teams I've seen working particularly in the B2B space, I've started to see a strong lean towards bringing pricing up early. These days there is just so much information available to a buyer in the market. We can find information online, we can find information through lots of sales collateral, that's available through newsletters, through podcasts, through colleagues. There are so many avenues that we can get information into our hands that comparing pricing is relatively easy to do across multiple providers. So by providing pricing early in the piece, we're actually able to get ahead of the curve, ahead of the price research and talk to the customer around the value that we're providing early. So an example here that I've seen work really well is that when we sit down, particularly in the services and consulting businesses, is that when you have your introductory meetings with clients, the very first discussions include what's your scope of works, what are you looking for, what's your need analysis, what are the best criteria that are going to allow you to select your provider? Oh, and by the way, how does the pricing model look for you and where you can't get that feedback immediately from a customer that says, look, we're looking to spend $50,000 over the next 12 months with a service provider who's going to provide us these three criteria, Financial reports, bash statements and good accounting advice. Right. If you're an accountancy firm, if we can't get those out, then we can flip the script and start to talk about what the expectation of our services and our pricing would include. What's really powerful here is that we get to understand if our customers are particularly price sensitive early. And whilst it doesn't work every time, it certainly does work in the majority of occasions. Right. We can actually start to say to customers, we're likely to send you back a proposal for 40 to 60 thousand dollars. It's going to include these three criteria, plus also some self managed super fund advice and some broad tax coverage in case you an audit. Fantastic. Which of those work for you? Which of these are really important? How does the pricing fit with what you're looking to spend. Now, that's not necessarily the negotiation on the price then and there, but what it does do is determine if your customers are in or outside of your pricing levers. Now, if they're outside of the pricing, that is, if they're wanting to spend less or perhaps wanting to spend more, you can have that conversation up front without spending all the time designing your scope of works or materials, only to get to the customer and find out that it's way outside of their budget. If you're outside of their pricing realm, you can also talk to them around what's missing, what's the value that's not quite right and what you'd need to do to be regarded as a genuine pricing option for that business. Certainly for me, in the very vast majority of projects that I've run over the last 20 years, I've encouraged teams to bring up price as early as you can so that you can have those hard conversations early. Don't walk past what you wouldn't accept, because by doing so you are so for me here, it's all about making sure that we start to talk to customers about value as early as we can. Because when we get to that final end around closing our deals, we're not worried about whether our pricing is too much or too little, but we're more focused on who the decision makers are and what we need to do to satisfy their final needs. So so far, there's two pieces around negotiation that I've seen work really, really well over my last 23 years in business. Number one is getting really, really clear around the needs analysis phase and making sure that by the time being we get to proposal and closing, we're very, very clear on what a customer needs. And number two is around bringing pricing up as early as we can. If there's going to be a problem with it, let's find out before we get to proposal so we can make all the adjustments in our quote and through our objection handling rather than at the end by trying to chase our tail. Those two I've seen work very, very powerfully. And if nothing else from this podcast today, I hope they're of value too. The third one for me is a negotiation framework. This is when we get to a point with customers where we simply need to go through a negotiation phase because they're unwilling to accept the offer we have. And this could be regardless of whether we've put forward a single offer or two or three or four offers. And if you flick back to the podcast episode with Brian Dietmar, I think it was episode 89. You'll actually see him talk around that. Across 20 to 30 years of sales research, the most common successful sales process he sees includes two to three options being presented by the seller to the buyer and that they often workshop those to come up with a fourth or a third that is most appropriate for the buyer. So encourage you to jump back and listen to that episode with Brian Dietmeyer when you can. But let's talk about a negotiation framework. For me, I've always worked around a framework that has a walk in, a fallback and a walk away position. We've heard plenty of negotiation frameworks as leaders across our sales career. Batner, Herb Cohen and his models, and there's scores of others out there, including the walk in, fallback and walk away negotiation principles. But this one for me works really well. And the reason it works really well is because it's so simple to follow. I'm a huge fan of simple frameworks. The simpler the better. Because as sales leaders and salespeople, we're simply not built to be remembering hundreds and hundreds of facts and technical policies around how we sell. But what we can do is remember simple frameworks. And I like to make sure that whenever we're going into any negotiation, we have a position that says this is our best case, this is our fallback position. So this is what we're going to follow if things don't quite go our way. But here's a whole lot of levers and principles that we can work around just in case the customer won't accept our walk in position and our walk away position. This is our very final set of numbers or T's and C's or criteria that we're prepared to agree to, failing which we actually walk away from the deal. So let's look at that in a bit more detail. Our walk in offer will generally include terms around price, payment terms, lengths of contract, key scope of work, criteria, conditions, precedent, bank guarantees, liquidated damages, service guarantees, any type of frameworks that talk around usage or guarantees to performance. For example delivery time frames, lead times being different to delivery time frames in how long it actually takes to manufacture the product, meeting key regulatory criteria, promotional support, sales team support, discounting, prompt payment discounts, training requirements, coaching requirements. Right? Lots and lots of things that can fall into being part of our walk in position. Our fallback position will then take all of those variables again and start to oscillate different options. In some cases, they actually won't change from our walk in position. We don't need to have a negotiation map that each stage has a different criteria for every single option. For example, price may not change between our walk in and our fallback, but payment terms may. We may allow our customers slightly longer to pay, or we may provide slightly better service guarantees, or we may provide prompt pay discounts, for example. But key criteria may stay the same in our fallback. And what we're trying to do is provide more value for the quoted price. We then move into our fallback position, where typically in most negotiations I've seen, there generally tends to be some price relief here. Generally, it's where customers and suppliers will say, you know what, let's try and find a price position that works here. But as suppliers or salespeople, we need to be really clear that this is our walkaway position. And failing to meet these key criteria, we walk away from the deal. I have seen businesses do it, particularly over the past two years, where they've had key criteria that if they can't be met, they walk away from. And that's based on an understanding that we simply must be profitable to run a business. And this particularly tends to occur when we have smaller businesses dealing with bigger businesses. So smaller businesses dealing with financial institutions, dealing with insurance companies, dealing with major marketing firms, or really serious players in a market. It's when smaller players need to say, do you know what? We actually can't work with that we need to walk away. And often what we see happen at the walkaway position, particularly when a walkaway position is implemented, so that's when a seller says to a buyer, do you know what? Thank you very much for your time, but we're unable to proceed further with a deal, is the number of times I have seen buyers turn around and say, actually, we will move forward, we are prepared to accept. The terms that you've provided us is really, really substantial. And the reason being that as buyers, we are often charged with trying to get the best possible deal that we can for our company. And that is very, very fair. But once you recognise that you've pushed your seller to their final point, the point of which there's no return, that's when buyers will often go, right, I've actually got the best deal that I possibly can. So sometimes being prepared to walk away from a negotiation isn't the worst thing. And particularly at this time of year, when we have timeframes around purchases, I've very consistently seen businesses who have had offers with expiry dates quite politely pull those offers from customers formally, only to see customers come back and say, hey, we'd actually like to move forward. What it does also do is if that a customer doesn't come back asking to move forward, it shows that they actually weren't ready so we can reload again. Hopefully we're not burning that opportunity. We're positioning in such a way that doesn't back ourselves into a corner, but we can reload again coming into next year and try and work through that customer proposal again. So there you have it. We have three negotiation principles that I see really successful teams use quite consistently to get deals done at the pointy end of the year. Number one, all about needs analysis and making sure you spend lots and lots of time there's and you're never too late to go back there, even if after you've presented, please feel that opportunity that you can go back and re qualify because it might just make the difference to you closing out that deal. Number two is around pricing, bringing out pricing early and as often as possible to make sure that customers are really comfortable with the value that you're providing without waiting until the end of the proposal to be given the hard news that you're simply outside of the expected pricing terms. And last but not least is having a negotiation framework with a walk in, a fallback and a walk away set of criteria that allows you to negotiate really clearly with your customer around the levers that you can and can't work on. Really importantly here where you can actually take those from your needs analysis framework, the investigation you've provided in the early days, that also allows you to be really focused on matching your negotiation framework with what you think will get the deal done. So that's it for today when it comes to closing out deals in the pointy end of the season before we finish off health and fitness again, we definitely cannot walk past it this time of year. I've been working recently with a nutritionist. I've really enjoyed it. It's the first time in my life that I've done it in detail. I'm certainly at that time in life where I'm experimenting with lots and lots of different things around my health and fitness. And I think the most impactful piece of advice that I've been given from this nutritionist is to time my fuel around my exercise. So previously it always worked off. When you have big sessions of exercise coming the next day, have a nice big carb load the night before, right? Spaghetti Bolognese, for example, being a really common one. What I've actually been working with this nutritionist on is all about making sure that your breakfast and your lunch, if you're exercising in the morning, is where you're getting most of your fuel from. Or if you're exercising in the afternoon, your lunch and your whatever you have after your exercise is really lined up and making sure that at that point of exercise you're fueling your body and then you're defueling and you're not eating as much around it. For those who are getting into the middle parts of our lives, we know that we have to be a little bit more focused on when and what we're eating and this is actually working really well for me. I've been able to find that I've been able to train a little bit harder by lining up my food around when I'm exercising. So sometimes the simple things just make such sense and in this case it has for me. That's it for today. Look forward to our episode next week as we close in on Christmas. For those listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.

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