A SaaS account executive shares ten lessons from ten years selling software. Deal risk, committee dynamics, believable ROI, and why securing the next step before hanging up matters more than closing the sale.
I want to take you through 10 of the most important lessons that I've learned most learned the hard way in my decade now in SaaS sales. Number one, if you are only hearing good news, you're probably losing the deal. All deals, even the strongest deals, have risk. A true champion shares that risk with you so you can help overcome it. No risk shared means you don't have a champion. And if you don't have a champion, it means you're probably, probably going to lose. Number two, the longer it takes to close a deal, the longer your buyer has to realize they are probably okay without your solution. No velocity, no deal. Number three, just because you're solving a problem doesn't mean you're going to win the deal. I used to be guilty of this all the time. I thought that I found something that hurt for the buyer, so if we could fix it, they would be good to go. Solving a problem doesn't win deals. Solving the problem does. Every executive you talk to has dozens, maybe hundreds of fires burning across their business. They only pay money and spend time to stop the fires that threaten to burn the entire thing down. Number four, having people constantly added to the evaluation committee isn't always a good thing. Okay? A lot of reps will see more people added to the conversation as an indicator of interest. However, sometimes it means nobody wants to take ownership of the decision and they keep extending the committee, so it becomes somebody else's decision and somebody else's problem. And when nobody wants to take ownership of the problem or your solution, you're not going to get the deal done. Number five, this one hurts a little bit. Your buyer spends most of their calls with you, multitasking. They're on email, they're on slack, they're on text. They're trying to do their actual job without being too distracted by you, which is just probably ancillary to their job. If you are not able to quickly capture their attention and keep them constantly engaged on the call, your calls are largely a waste of time. They're not hearing what you say and they're not remembering what you say. So even if you're saying all the right things, your deal is not progressing. Number six, people don't believe your fancy ROI projections. You're using the ROI calculator, you're using data from the industry, you're using all these valid sources. But if the business case is not in your buyer's language, with numbers they gave you, it's not taken seriously. I think about this. Most tech companies have some form of an ROI White paper showing the time to pay back the ROI over a period of time. If that was actually believable, all you'd have to do to sell is, is hand deliver that ROI white pager to every account in your books. CFO like, hey, here's the data. ROI is there. It's not how it works. If it's not in their language with their numbers, it's not a real ROI projection. Number seven, buyers are biased against sellers. It's just inherent. Almost everybody, if not everybody, has had bad experiences with sellers being sold things they didn't need, being pushed too hard. And so all buyers have some level of bias against seller. Anytime you sound the same as other sellers, you're strengthening that bias. If you want to win, learn to sound different. And that's across every stage of the sales cycle. Number eight, you cannot create compelling events. And sales leaders are guilty of this too when they're pushing you. Well, what's the component about? How can we, how can we create urgency? You really, you really can't. End of quarter discounts don't count in trying to create a compelling event. The only consistent way to accelerate deals is to make the buyer's status quo unbearable. If there are not strong negative consequences tied to the status quo, their current state that the buyer wants to run away from, then your deal is not going to have urgency. And even discounts aren't going to do much to move the needle because buyers understand that once discount is offered, usually that discount is always available, even if they don't sign this month, this quarter, or whatever the arbitrary timeline is that you give them. Number nine, a poorly run deal with a strong executive connection will beat a well run deal with no executive connection. If you're working larger deals, upper six figures, seven figures plus, and your C level is not talking to their C level or at least SVP to SVP for larger companies, you're going to get blindsided by the competitor that is. I have lost in my career some extremely well run deals. We had a great business case, we had a great champion, we had everything won at every level. Users, middle managers, senior managers. But because of the politic aspect of executive to executive that our competitors had, we got blindsided, we got beat. So when you're looking at your deals, you cannot say that you have dotted every I and crossed every T if you have not established an executive connection early and keeping it going throughout the deal cycle. And finally, number 10, there is nothing more important to cover at the end of the call than selling next steps. There is nothing in your agenda. There are no questions to ask. There are no features to show in a demo that are more important importance then selling on next steps and aligning on when the next conversation is and what you're going to accomplish. It's much better to miss out on agreed on agenda items and get those next steps rather than finish the agenda just to take the next steps offline. These are all lessons that I've again learned, often the hard way. I hope understanding these is helpful for you as you continue your career in SaaS sales. If you found this video helpful, let me know I'm going the right direction by leaving a like on this video. Then if there are any questions or topics you want to make sure I cover in a future video, leave me a comment. I read all comments and I love recommendations that will help me help you sell more. Finally, don't forget to subscribe. That way you won't miss any of my upcoming content that I'm creating to help you improve the way that you sell.
