Steli's Essential Guide to Negotiation Hacks

What's the right attitude, mindset and energy to sell SaaS products? Many people, particularly those whose first profession isn't sales get this wrong.

They either

• go for the close like a sales assassin, sell like a shark, bring in deals like the Wolf of Wallstreet,
• or they sell like gentle lamb, a caring consultant, simply offering a choice and letting prospects decide on their own.

Both of these sales styles won't lead to sustainable success.

Let's take a closer look at both of them, and then see what you can do to succeed in SaaS sales.

People will sometimes reach out and ask for a discount on your product before they took the time to sign up for a trial and use it at all. What do you do when that happens?

Instead of debating if you should or shouldn't offer them a discount right away, you need to refocus their energy on what really matters: your product!

Let's explore the 3 core reasons why you never want to negotiate pricing before someone had a chance to trial your product and determine that it's a good fit.

I recently listened to our sales guy talking with a prospect who had a seemingly endless list of objections. He wanted feature X, he didn't like the way our sales CRM lacked social features, he thought we should improve the mobile experience, and it just went on and on like this. A never-endling list of requests.

Our sales guy defended our app. Immediately jumped in after every objection. Lots of explanations and excuses.

The prospect kept on going. More objections. More demands.

It went back and forth like this for several rounds, and the call wasn't going anywhere. It was just tiring and exhausting, and no value was created for either party. The sales conversation slowly but surely deteriorated into one big waste of time.

How do you handle a situation like this? What can you do when you're inundated by objections, and for every answer you give, you just get another objection?

I have talked about the importance of listening and asking questions.

But there's another way to utilize questions to close more deals: flip them.

Imagine you're talking with a prospect that loves your product, and they would be willing to buy if only _______{insert objection X}. Objection X can be anything, but most commonly in sales it's pricing. So let's use that as an example. How can you negotiate your way around _____ {obection X} and close the deal if you can't actually deliver on objection X?

The prospect wants to buy, but only at a steep discount. What usually happens at this point is a long back and forth between seller and prospect. Sometimes that negotiation leads to a deal, sometimes it doesn't.

Are you in the final stages of negotiating a deal with a large customer or partner? And now you need to send over the paperwork?

Here’s a simple sales-hack to get a LOI (Letter of Intent) template that will get signed quicker, and reduce the amount of legal hassle to a minimum. This works for a letter of intent, as well as other kinds of purchasing contracts, letters of agreement, term sheets, etc.

It can happen to the best of us. We pursue a deal, negotiate for the terms, put in all this effort and get them to sign the dotted line. Only to figure out a short while later, that the terms of the deal are bad. That’s sellers remorse.

What do you do now? Do you just try to make the best of a bad bargain? Do you go back to the prospect and re-negotiate the deal?

If you do re-negotiate the deal, how do you go about it? How do you bring it up with the prospect? How do you tell them what you both just agreed upon isn’t acceptable? In what words do you let them know?