Brian LaManna recounts a sales anecdote where an initial 'we can't sign' email turned into a closed-won deal within six hours. He describes leading with empathy, moving to a live call, uncovering budget flexibility via a champion who shared his screen, and securing approval after the champion discussed re-allocating software line items with his CFO. He closes with three explicit lessons: (1) when receiving bad news, push for a live conversation; (2) invest in strong champions and trust-building; (3) budgets are often gray—probe for flexibility. Ends with a CTA to his LinkedIn and newsletter.
Chapters
Here's a crazy story of an email that I received and they actually ended up signing less than six hours later. So here's what I responded. I led with empathy and shared hey, I know that's not the news that you were hoping to hear. Let's still meet today. We have a couple critical things to cover and I'd also love to share a few creative ideas. So we ended up hopping on a call and I asked them what happened. What he shared back was that they have no additional approvals and to spend on software for this fiscal year. So I ran some more discovery. I asked them how do budgets actually work at XYZ company And what he did was he shared that they actually bucketed into different items like people like travel, like software expenses and to be able to move money from one bucket to another bucket took board level approvals. Knowing this, I asked, well, what else is in that software budget that you could potentially pull from? To my shock, my champion actually started sharing his screen on Zoom, pulled up his budget and started walking through line item by line item, each spend within that software category. In reviewing those line item by line item, we uncovered that one of those expenses they weren't actually planning to even renew with come the next fiscal year. I then asked, hey, would we just be able to sub those two items out without having to go back to the board for approval? He wasn't sure, but he said, hey, I can at least have a conversation with my CFO around that topic later today. Five hours later I got an email from my champion saying send over the docuSign and 5 seconds later I had that docusign within his inbox. A few critical lessons from this deal Number one is that if you do receive bad news within a deal cycle and you likely will always push to have a live conversation and learn more about it first. Number two, you need to invest in building super strong champions. This conversation would have never taken place and he would have never shared his screen if we didn't have that level of trust already built going into that call number three, budgets are often more gray than black and white. There's not going to be a line item waiting for your software. So continue to fight and showcase why it's worth it. If deal stories and lessons like this are helpful, check out my LinkedIn profile and subscribe to my newsletter at close1XYZ.
