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There are a bunch of key indicators that happen throughout the buying/selling process that help us understand the true ‘health’ of any opportunity we’re working on and whether we’re in a good or bad position to win the deal. This key indicator (more time to make a decision) is was what told me I was going to lose a $200k deal before I actually lost it. When she pushed the third time, I didn’t send an e-mail or call her to tell her I was moving on from the deal, I just let it go and focused my time on other opportunities that I knew had a higher likelihood of closing. As one of my mentors M. Jeffrey Hoffman once told me – the worst sin in sales is not to lose a deal, it’s to take a long time to lose a deal.

I received this email last week (looks like the end of someone’s Q1), which is a great example of sales done wrong, in my opinion. It’s easy for me to say never discount, but I understand the reality of discounting and how sometimes it’s necessary to get the deal over the finish line. If you’re doing sales the right way, there should never be a need to apologize, especially for reaching out to an existing account. If you are going to discount If you are going to discount, make your customers feel special, and make sure you’re getting something in return.

In Sales, we’re always looking for the perfect template, pitch, or presentation, when all the client is looking for is someone to understand their needs and provide a solution to a challenge they’re trying to address. In training, we try to create the perfect role play or scenario that drives the exact outcome we’re looking for when we all know it rarely works out that way. There’s a much broader discussion I think we need to have about authenticity at another time, but to make this tactical here are some things you can do to keep things real in the sales process: The good news is authenticity isn’t that hard for people who care and as sad as this sounds, it can be leveraged as a competitive differentiator in today’s sales environment.

The ideal approach to cold calling is to spend some time on your prospect’s website or Linkedin profile and find something specific to reference about them or their company and make a direct connection to the value your service can provide. If you can get a good enough sized list by title (CEO) and industry (Tech) then you can start to figure out what those people care about and what their priorities are by doing a simple search on google for “CEO Tech Industry Priorities 2019. The good thing about staying focused on a specific group of people and knowing their priorities is that you can come up with very specific questions that show you know what you’re talking about when reaching out to these people and you can stay away from the generic BANT questions. By taking a specific approach with a specific message to a target audience and segmenting an hour to do so we can figure out fairly quickly whether a message/approach is working or not.