Jesse Pujji explains why objections and negotiations are different: objections mean no, negotiations mean they're interested. Start by asking prospects what a win looks like for them, which reveals their priorities and constraints before you try to move forward.
Objections and negotiations. What's the difference? I think of objections as, as reasons people are trying to say no to doing your deal. And negotiating is when someone wants to do the deal and is trying to find the path forward. If someone in the beginning of a call early on says, oh, it's too expensive, one of two things is true. Typically, one is either you've done a poor job of explaining the value, or the second thing is like they're just not the right customer for you. Sometimes we'll talk to lower middle market private equity and they're like, it's too expensive. And we're like, yeah, you're right, you're too small. Like, your deals are too small. We don't make sense for you. Let's go find something different. The starting point of any negotiation, of any conversation is, is lots of information gathering. There's all these questions you want to start asking in a very open-ended way to collect as much possible information as you have. Typically what I'll do is when you're in the middle of the process, you're like, hey, I want to make sure that I can get a sense for what you're looking for. So it'd be really helpful if I could take 15 minutes now to really understand what a win looks like for you.
