Attention: This is a long post. You may learn something if you spend 5-10 minutes reading it. However, if you don't want to spend the time, you'll never learn how to unstuck that big whale of a Q2 deal.
EOQ is the most exciting yet paralyzing part of sales. You can either make waves with big deals or drown in the mediocrity of your pipeline. No matter where you are about to end up at the end of the day on Wednesday, I want to share two tools that you can pull out of your back pocket to either get a few deals unstuck or pull a deal or two into Q2: Positive Implications and Negative Consequences.
Positive Implications
This one is easier to leverage because it makes everyone feel good. The key to leveraging this psychological tool is based on you doing excellent discovery early on with your prospect. What could happen to them if they bring your technology/service/firm?
- Will they get promoted?
- Will they save the company $100,000?
- Will they simply get to keep their job?
Find that thing that implies there is something WONDERFUL about bringing you into the company, and leverage it during your negotiation and check-in calls. Keep reminding them how awesome you will make them look internally; psychologically they are bound to cling to that idea, and then you can get them to sell you harder internally.
Negative Consequences
Now, this one is a little ickier. Again, you can only leverage this psychological tool if you've done great discoveries early on. It's kind of the unspoken bits that aren't implicitly shared by the buyer, but when you pick up on them, you can use them as pressure points to really get someone to move. Examples include:
- They will be fired if they don't fix this problem.
- Their company will have to lay off X employees if they cannot support this function.
- They will miss a massive go-to-market date if they can't roll X out.
- Employees will experience X pain points, leading to higher rates of churn.
- If they miss this deadline they will experience something catastrophic as a company/department/individual
Again, you can only pick these up if you ask really good discovery questions. You can also pick these up during technical validation calls or other discussions with champions/stakeholders. The point is, find something that you can use as a negative consequence of not moving forward. This can also be a great way to hold folks to dates outlined in a POC/Trial or evaluation because you can tie the miss back to a pain point.
Cool, so there you have it. Two end-of-quarter tools you can pull out of the bag to get a few deals moving that have otherwise been stuck. However, leverage them early on in your deal cycles and see if your Q3 numbers improve. If they do, I'll send you my Venmo for 1% on all closed business.
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