Bhavan Kochar shares strategies for account executives on negotiation, handling objections, and understanding the full sales process beyond demos. He emphasizes aligning your definition of success with your company's goals to build a sustainable career in sales.
Foreign rules of negotiation. And I'll just touch on them. Number one, never ever commit on a call on a price. Just never. You're in the heat of a conversation, you don't want to commit on a call, always take time. Tell them, I'll come back to you in one hour, two hours, one day. Think about it. Yeah, absolutely. You want to end the call, you want to rethink whatever you committed on the call or whatever you said. You want to go to someone else and take an unbiased view, especially if the deal is big or what do they think about the offer because they might give you or suggest something that you didn't think of because you're emotionally attached to that negotiation. So never ever commit on the call. That's number one. Number two, know who you're negotiating with. This is the biggest pitfall. New AES fall into that. They start negotiating with this fox, they start negotiating with the business folks rather than negotiating with the right teams. What ends up happening is first they negotiate with, in our case, let's say we negotiate with the HR leader or the chrm and once they have negotiated a price, they hand it over to a commercial team or a procurement team who now want an even better deal. The easy part is to do that. The harder part is to say no to your spark and say, hey, I don't think that is a conversation you and I need to have. For me, what's most important for you is to give me a sign off that you like the platform and let the right team or the commercial team or the procurement team handle that part of the conversation. Sometimes we end up negotiating with the wrong people and we get stuck. That's most important to me. And third thing is always reiterate during negotiation on why they're looking to buy. The value that your product offers is unparalleled in terms of when you're offering a price. And something I was taught very, very early when I was becoming an ae, that if your product, if the prospect sees value in your product, even a hundred thousand dollars is not a big amount. If they don't see value, even a hundred dollars is a big amount for them. And sometimes we feel just dropping the price, that's all it takes. But it doesn't take that. And we've seen deals, right, where we have negotiated to the extent we could, but we still lose them, right? Absolutely. We've lost too many on that. We sell in India, so you can imagine how important pricing we have multiple people coming on calls to try their hand at negotiating with us, we've lost plenty of deals on pricing. However, that doesn't make, that doesn't reduce the value of our product. At the same time, I would say eight out of 10 deals in the last two months that we've closed, we've closed at at least a 30% premium than our nearest competitor because the proskents saw the value that we were. What you do as an A is very different from what you were doing as an sdr. So you're starting from scratch. So you've got to build new skills now which sometimes as an SDR it's okay not to have. And I think those are some of the key areas that we want to focus on. 9 out of 10 sales orgs focus on helping the person deliver the perfect demo. But sales is so much more than delivering a perfect demo and we've been guilty of it. When I've had people moving into the role and I've done it multiple times, four weeks, we've just focused on teaching them how to demo. Go on a demo call, learn how we are pitching. You do a mock demo to us. But what happens after that is even more difficult. How do they go out and handle objections? Now with more and more interviews that we are doing, I realize that I would say more than 50% people, when they're handling objections, they listen to an objection to answer. They never take a step back and ask a follow up question to understand that objection much better. You will, you will struggle. It's the reality. And don't be scared of failing as an A because you will. It's the truth. Even the best days have bad quarters, have bad years, but it doesn't make them a bad salesperson. It's just a phase they're going through. I've never seen a salesog where people have turned around and said I have three best people. Never happened. There's always one best. The rest are two, three and four. Correct. I would go to that number one person and find out what are those extra? Because it's always the one or two things that that person is doing that is making him or her more successful than the rest of the firms. And I want to learn from either one of those two people because they are the people who can either teach me how to sell because I don't know how to sell or teach me what are some of the challenges I'm going to face in the first four quarters. Now if your definition of success for yourself doesn't match with the definition of the CEO for success for you, you have a problem. So it's very important very early on to have that straight up chat of how do you see successfully some of the most successful account executives do the best discoveries and people underrate discovery so much for some reason, especially when they have an SDR they're working with, they assume all the information the SDR has given to them is in touch it. And my job is just to go out there and do a demo and sell. It's not.
