“One of the things you can do to help speed up Q4 deals inside your own company is have an internal conversation with your leadership, with your deal teams on high priority in contract deals.” – David Weiss in today’s Tip 1361
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1360: Closing Q4 Deals (Part 1)
David Weiss LinkedIn Post
David Weiss on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. This weekend David Weiss is here to help us think about how best to close out our Q4 deals in a 2 part series. If you missed the first part you might want to jump back to tip #1360. Here’s part 2:
David Weiss: All right. So last time we reviewed actions that you can take with your potential future client. Now we’re going to talk about some things you can do inside your own company.
So one of the things you can do to help speed up Q4 deals inside your own company is have an internal conversation with your leadership, with your deal teams on high priority in contract deals. And talk to them about your gift to get, your walkaway numbers. Ideally where they’d like to see the deal land at both on contract terms as well as cost points and as well as kind of things that they want in return. Like do we want more references, do we want client testimonials, do we want to be able to use their logo on the website? Do we want to be able to write papers or have them speak at conferences? There are great levers that the business can pull to gain advantages to sell future deals that you may want to sacrifice certain things now to get greater growth later. These are all things you want to discuss internally.
So have those conversations ahead of time. And so when procurement does ask for things, you don’t need to bother an already bogged down group of people that are talking to lots of different folks inside your business about lots of different deals, you’ve got to figure out ahead of time so you know your guardrails and how to operate.
Lastly, when you’re presenting things to procurement, do your best to present them as best and final. The reason for this is procurement is trained to keep asking for stuff until you get to know. So the faster you can find out your guardrails, understand their asks, communicate those guardrails, and let them know that no matter how much more they ask, you’ve already done your legwork, you’ve already talked to all your teams, and this is the best you can do. That’s when real decisions can be made. So get to that point as soon as possible.
Next, brief your executives on key deals that you may need their support on. Make sure they have an executive summary. Make sure that they know the key players. Hopefully, you’ve introduced them to other executives at your hopeful future client and they’ve built relationships. So if and when the deal goes sideways, something breaks down in negotiation, procurement is taking too long to get back to you. You’re missing a milestone. There’s an ask that you frankly just can’t agree to. You have your team prepared and ready with what needs to happen so they can go directly to their peer executive and have an executive-to-executive conversation. By having this ready ahead of time, it again just kind of speeds up the deal cycle, and your execs know where you may run into trouble and where they may need to support and help so they can help you get it across the line.
Lastly, this feedback is more for you to share with executives or leadership, or if there is a leader listening to this call, they hopefully heed this advice, which is cut back on all unnecessary trainings, extra meetings, anything that’s not related to closing out the year. Try and save for the start of Q1. There’s always plenty of time to do more training, and Q1 is the time to do it. Support your team, get involved in deals, focus on closing exercises, and just remember this is an incredibly tough time of year for your entire revenue ecosystem. In every decision you’re making, just have empathy. Think about the team already being stressed way more than their max. Do what you can to help reduce that stress by removing last-minute tasks and extra meetings and just create space and have people’s back. That’s what they need from you this time of year and please deliver that to them and they will be eternally grateful and work that much harder to get revenue across the line right now. Thanks for listening. I appreciate it and if I can do anything for anybody, please let me know. Take care.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with David and for a link to his original LinkedIn post that inspired this two-part series. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/1361. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!