Good Morning. An internet provider called Fidium built a website teaching people how to turn its competitors’ sales flyers into paper airplanes. They’ve also got tutorials for paper cranes and those little fortune tellers we used to make as kids. A whole arts and crafts operation to mess with the competition. And I totally respect the pettiness. Especially when the competitor is paying for the supplies. Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:
Getting around the discount 🤝
Turning a $4.5K deal into $91K 😄
Why all the big AI companies use the same recruiter 👀
Sales jobs & a meme 😂
Sales Tip of The Day 💡
Before you offer a discount, find out if the price is the problem or if they just can't pay it all upfront.
They might be fine spending $24,000 over the year, but writing a $24,000 check today is a different story.
If that's what's holding things up, see if you can split it into monthly or quarterly payments.
Just make sure that would actually solve their problem before you go get it approved. (:
Wait, what did I promise them?
You’re about to follow up with a prospect, but you can’t remember what you told them you’d send.
Was it pricing? A case study? Both?
Before you start digging through notes, ask Granola:
“Hey Granola, what did I promise in my last call with [prospect]?”
Granola transcribes your sales calls, then lets you ask questions about what was said. You get the answer in seconds, with links back to your notes.
Now you can follow up with what you actually promised.
Try Granola free and use code THEFOLLOWUP for a free month.
His Sales Team Oversold a $4.5k Deal. He Turned It Into $91k.
The sales team at vFairs had just closed a $4,500 deal with a group of math entrepreneurs…but there was a catch.
They promised features the platform didn’t have.
Enter Hassaan Siddiq, who stepped in to manage the implementation and save the relationship. The following year, the client signed a $91,000 agreement.
Here’s how he pulled it off.
At the time, Hassaan had over seven years of client-facing experience and had managed $15M across SMB and enterprise portfolios.
When he joined vFairs, it was during COVID, when virtual events were exploding. A group of mathematical entrepreneurs, representing an academic association, had bought a contract to host a virtual conference of 600+ sessions.
On top of that, they wanted to host multiple live meetings at the same time. On paper, it looked simple. Behind the scenes, sales had promised custom single sign-on integrations and features vFairs didn’t actually have at the time.
“Sales had made unrealistic promises to close the contract,” Hassaan recalls. “We were left playing catch up on a high-stakes account that was heading straight for churn before we even launched.”
Hassaan built a business case and brought the CEO, CTO, CPO, and the AE who’d closed the deal into one room to work out what they could actually deliver.
Nothing brings departments together like a feature that doesn’t exist. 😄
Hassaan proposed hands-on support for the early events, with the new technical integrations kicking off at the 3rd event in their 9-event contract.
Then came the really hard part… telling the client.
Hassaan met with them directly with total honesty.
He explained that rushing custom features risked a clunky launch that could ruin live presentations altogether.
Instead, his team would provide live support at the first 2 events while engineering built the missing integrations. In other words, people would do the work the software couldn’t yet do.
Think of it like taking stairs while the elevator was being installed. The client could still get where they needed to go.
And it all worked out.
His team delivered over-the-top live support from day one, so the client trusted them enough to wait. When the third event came, the custom integrations launched seamlessly across all 600+ sessions.
The big payoff.
The following year, that $4,500 customer signed a $91,000 contract.
The client trusted Hassaan and his team and was ready to expand the relationship.
And to keep this from happening again, Hassaan set some ground rules for handling situations like this, including when to say no to work outside the deal. He also automated onboarding in their CRM, so customers could get up and running eight days faster.
Looking back, Hassaan says:
“The goal in post-sales isn’t to build client dependency,” he notes. “It’s about respecting their time and empowering them to use the product independently so they can achieve real, repeatable outcomes.”
Hassaan’s takeaway for sales reps:
“Stop treating customer success like a reactive cleanup crew. When you involve delivery managers (or customer success) early in the discovery process, you stop selling features that don't exist, and start building relationships that actually expand.”
Have you ever promised something your product couldn’t actually do to close a deal?
Sales Around The Web 🗞
🤖 OpenAI built a GTM assistant tool for their internal sales team, and a lot of people think they’re going to release it as a SaaS product.
📞 This kid cold called Jensen Huang expecting to get ignored, but ended up in a conversation with him when he called back.
👀 A deep dive into why OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Cognition are all using the same recruiting company to build out their GTM teams.
Cool Sales Jobs 💼
Sales Development Rep @ Twilio
Sales Development Rep @ Numeral
Account Executive @ Owner
Channel Account Manager @ ProsperOps
Sales Meme of the Day
Today’s newsletter was written by Nic Conley & Alison White
