Negotiate like a pro during a savings showdown (Hunter Swanson, Enterprise Regional VP @ DocuSign)

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1. 5:20

   the person who can make the call and saying, okay, no, no, not me. My guess is you're doing some back and forth in that moment. So Nick says it's too expensive. What do you say in return? You've got to be curious. So the first thing that I would want someone to do is ask and try “to understand, Nick, what were you expecting? You mentioned that it's expensive. Were you looking” at others? What were you referencing that suddenly feels like we're pretty far off in what we're proposing and what we felt pretty confident and excited to show you versus what you're actually seeing from your end? Can you give me a sense of what your

   In Price and budget objections

2. 19:23

   ask right so it depends on how many teams this is touching or if it might just be a sales decision where you and your manager your vp of sales need to decide if it's worth getting to that discount or slashing the price a little bit more what I'd typically do though is I would always want the AE “to schedule a next step and set expectations of when we should be able to have this done by” and that way then we're not chasing them down once we've got good news so Nick it's Tuesday you've asked for all these concessions this is big I think we can get this done and have it something ready presentable by Friday so why don't we put something on as a placeholder

   In Discovery next-step agreement

3. 26:13

   And the final question is this, we've talked about a lot of really great things salespeople should be doing. Now I got to ask you about a shouldn't. And so my final question is, what's one bad habit that you see a lot of salespeople exhibiting that you think they need to break because it hurts them more than it helps? Okay, so this is something that you might have actually heard me just say on this call, “but never leave a call or a meeting without a next step, a next meeting established.” So even if the prospect needs to coordinate a few calendars, let's say you just had a demo and it was a big group and they're saying, hey, send us a few dates and we'll get back to you. I need to coordinate things. It's always better to have a placeholder on the calendar rather than needing to chase them down later on.

   In Meeting-setting asks

4. 26:48

   to you. I need to coordinate things. It's always better to have a placeholder on the calendar rather than needing to chase them down later on. So what I would always say is, hey, great, totally understand it. Typically, we would allot for a week turnaround time from the demo to getting your feedback and walking through next steps. “Why don't I at least put a placeholder on for Tuesday afternoon?” Worst case scenario, we can move that meeting to a different time or date, but at least it's on our schedule. And that way, I don't have meetings come up and suddenly now we're two weeks later and now looking at dates. Also from a prospect's perspective, they can't avoid it. So their email might be getting slammed every single day.

   In Meeting booking and confirmation

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