Letting a Buyer Walk Away Will Win You More Business

Good Morning. Anthropic just posted a new role paying up to $405,000 to help its sales team use more AI. They want someone with an engineering background and sales experience to build AI agents that can help their sales team sell more. It’s good to see that the company behind the world’s most powerful AI still needs salespeople. And they’re hiring a $405K engineer to give them more superpowers. Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

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A property owner comes to Aaron Sussman with a $28 million property they need to refinance.

His team looks at the numbers and sees that too many units sit empty, and the income is weak.

Sussman could take on the deal right then.

But instead, he tells the owner to fill more units, get the rent income steady, and come back in 120 days. That would put them in a spot to get a better loan.

Four months is a long time to wait on a deal when you have a sales goal to hit. Especially when the client is ready to move forward.

But 120 days later, the owner comes back. Sussman says his team finds a lender and gets the deal done, with better terms than the owner would have received four months earlier.

By telling the client to wait, Sussman shows he cares about what happens after the papers are signed. He’s willing to put off his commission check to help the owner get a better deal.

Now that client has a reason to trust him. The next time they need a loan, there’s a good chance Sussman is their first call.

Today I’m breaking down how to tell a prospect you can’t help them yet, and how it could be your best hack to winning better deals.

A lot of our job in sales is learning how to overcome objections that prospects throw our way.

Any good BDR job should teach you how to respond when someone says the timing isn’t right, or they don’t have budget, or (my favorite) just send me over some information.

So it feels backwards to tell a prospect that they probably shouldn’t buy our tool after we’ve put so much effort into convincing them that they should.

If you want to become a great sales rep and have longevity in your industry, you need to learn whether an objection is just an excuse or a legitimate reason they shouldn’t buy.

Let’s take a hypothetical prospect who says, “Your software seems too expensive.”

Their company just raised $30 million, has 100 employees, and your tool could save one of their teams 37 hours of work each week.

That’s a real problem you can help with. You just need to convince them that the value you’re providing is worth the price you’re asking for.

Now take a 2-person startup. They’re bootstrapped, make $100,000 in annual profit, and your platform costs $50,000 a year. They don’t have a whole team spending hours on the work your software handles. And let’s even say that they’re willing to buy and you don’t have to overcome a bunch of objections.

Your price would eat up half their profit, and most of your platform would sit unused.

You could push the sale through and collect a commission check. But you’d almost certainly wind up having an unhappy customer who churns.

Both prospects have the same objection: “It’s too expensive.” You have to figure out which one needs more convincing, and which isn’t a good fit.

Let’s stick with those two founders who make $100K for a minute.

You tell them to keep their $50,000 and explain that their current setup should work fine until they have a bigger team.

Acting like a consultant gives them something to remember you by. You had a chance to take their money, but you helped them avoid a purchase they would’ve regretted.

A sales rep on Reddit says he’ll sometimes recommend a competitor’s product when it fits the customer better. It seems crazy, but it’s led to a ton of callbacks and large deals that don’t take a lot of effort.

When you’re honest with them about your product not being a good fit, they’ll trust you later when it is.

Telling someone they’re not a good fit can sound like you’re brushing them off. Like they’re not good enough for you.

So you’ve gotta give them enough detail to understand why you’re saying it.

For those 2 founders, you could say: “You’d be spending way too much to solve a problem that’s not actually a bottleneck for your team right now. You should keep doing it the way you’re doing it, and once you’re hiring more people, our tool would make a lot of sense.”

Then take that same explanation to your boss. We all know your manager doesn’t want to hear you told a prospect they’re not a good fit. After all, your quota is also a part of their quota.

So they’re probably going to have questions about the deal you just took out of the pipeline.

I’d go into that conversation with the numbers: what the buyer would pay, how little they’d use, and what would need to change before buying makes sense.

“They only have 2 people doing this work, so they wouldn’t get much out of our tool. Even if we closed them, they’d churn pretty quickly because the value isn’t there for them yet. I told them to hold off. We agreed to reconnect in 3 months when they start hiring, and I’m putting that time toward accounts with teams that need this now.”

You want the customer to be glad they signed when the first bill arrives.

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.