Strategies for Winning Competitive Negotiations

A prospect tells you: "We’re also looking at [Competitor]." Most reps make one of two mistakes: - They panic and start discounting before the customer even asks. - They attack the competitor, thinking that will win trust. The best reps? They guide the conversation...without badmouthing or getting defensive. Here’s how we teach folks to do it at Sales Assembly: 1) Find the gap. Instead of “We’re better because…” ask: “What made you start looking in the first place? What’s missing today?” This gets them to focus on their pain, not a feature battle. 2) Understand their criteria. Instead of “Why are you considering them?” ask: “What’s most important to you in a solution?” You want them defining success in your playing field. 3) Focus on fit, not features. Instead of “We’re better at X,” ask: “What’s been standing out to you in each option so far?” If they highlight something critical you do better, that’s your opening. 4) Help them think ahead. Instead of “They don’t do [X] like we do,” say: “A lot of teams in your space have prioritized [X] because it impacts [Y]. How are you thinking about that?” This frames the conversation around outcomes - not a feature war. 5) Guide the decision process. Instead of “Who’s your front-runner?” ask: “What’s your process for narrowing down options?” If they don’t have a clear decision path, they’re likely to stall. 6) Make the decision feel easy. Instead of “How can we win this deal?” ask: “If you had to make a decision today, what would give you confidence?” This surfaces final concerns...so you can remove them. The goal isn’t to beat competitors. It’s to help buyers feel confident that choosing you is the right move.

11 negotiation tips I wish I knew when I started in sales: 1. Forget what they're asking for. Uncover the underlying need. Your buyer's 'ask' is a means to an end. What's their end? If you uncover that, you can find a solution. If you don't, it's impossible to negotiate. You can only haggle. 2. How you explain your pricing can either prevent or create objections. Bad way: "We charge $1k/seat and have a 5 seat min." Better way: "Our initial pricing is $5,000, and that covers you up to your first five users." 3. Quantify the business value. Do this before you negotiate. A $100,000 price tag looks like a lot to anybody. But a $10 million problem makes $100k look like nothing. 4. Establish 'must have' differentiation. Naive sellers think quantifying value is enough to win. It's not. Because if your buyer thinks your competitor can deliver the same value, but they're 50% of your price? You're toast. 5. A motivated champion is your best defense against procurement. Procurement grinding you down on price? Nothing like a champion to exercise their political capital. Creating champions is a skill. Learn it. 6. Multi-threading is your best "deal insurance." What happens if that champion gets canned? That's a lonely place to be. Building a multi-threaded network in a deal is your best insurance policy. 7. Begin the negotiation session by summarizing the business value. It's easy to argue over price in a vacuum. “II thought I’d spend the first few minutes summarizing the key elements of our partnership so we’re on the same page. Fair?” Remind them what's at stake. 8. Put the onus on your buyer. When you run into an issue, ask them a question. "What do you think is the best way for us to find a win/win?" Get them to solve the problem. They'll feel in control. 9. Never agree to a concession without knowing what comes next. Your buyer asks for a 10% discount? Great. You have authority to give it. But don't yet. Instead ask this: "If we came to an agreement on price, still has to happen before partnering together?" Most likely, they have more asks. Get all of those on the table before responding to a single one. 10. Give your concessions in decreasing increments. If your first concession is 10% off, then your next one is another 10% off, guess what? Your buyer thinks they can get yet another 10% off. But if your first concessions is 10% off, and your next concession is 3% off, your buyer feels they're at the end. 11. Isolate price resistance into 1 of 3 buckets: "Usually if people have an issue at price at this stage, it's for 1 of 3 reasons: First, you don't see the value. Second, you do see the value, but you have some sort of constraint. Third, you're just trying to get the best deal you can. Which of these is true for you?" Solve accordingly based on their answer. What tips would you add?

How to win competitive deals: Step 1: Your product is NOT the only way to solve the problem. There are multiple ways to solve any problem. One way is your product. Another way is doing it "in-house" Another way is with your competitor. STOP: Acting like the only way to solve the problem is buying your product. Treating your product as the holy grail to fixing the problem ruins your credibility. (You're gonna leverage that credibility in Step 2) ___ Step 2: Teach the customer ALL the ways to solve their problem. Once you've accepted that your product might have viable competitors (doing things in house, hiring an agency, buying a competitor, doing this with spreadsheets, etc), it's time to teach your customer the same thing. Consider saying something like: "Dave, thanks for sharing a little about your lead routing issue. I think that we're fairly well-poised to solve it, but I'm wondering if you might find it helpful to give you a lay of the land of some of the other ways folks have solved this issue, beyond just our product?" (The customer will always say yes) Now you've received permission to TEACH your customer about the competition. This is a good thing because it allows you to position why you're better while also DQ-ing deals that the competition is better suited to service. (That's Step 3) ___ Step 3: Teach the prospect pros and cons of each solution. Hint, your competitors are GREAT at certain things. Hint, the things your competitors are GREAT at are NOT the things that you heard mattered the most to your prospect. Hint, your product is NOT great at certain things. Hint, those things you're weak at are NOT the things that mattered most to your prospect. Do not deceive the customer. That'll bite you in the long run. BUT, the way you position where you're strong and weak VS where the competition is strong and weak can make or break your sale. When teaching about their options: Match your strengths to what they care about. Match your weaknesses to what they don't care about. Match your competition's strengths to what they don't care about. Match your competition's weaknesses to what they do care about. ___ Step 4: Do things your competition can't When I sold legaltech, I frequently went head-to-head with Thompson Reuters (25,00 employees, a behemoth!) Every winnable deal, I'd pull my CEO into the deal to meet with the Exec sponsor on the customer side. For my company, every ~50k deal was worth that meeting. The rep at Thompson Reuters could never get their CEO involved in a 50k deal. I taught the customer that a "personal touch" and executive alignment mattered for the type of software I was selling. Because the competition could not deliver the same thing, we won time & time again. ___ On November 8th, I'm going to be running a session with Klue and Qayam Noorani on dismantling competitors. Comment "personal touch" and I'll personally send you the invite link!

From "send us the DocuSign" to more (attempted) negotiating. A short story, from earlier this year. After a 6 month evaluation, the team wanted to buy. The biggest hangup was pricing. We spent a next month going back and forth, with a grueling process. Our teams came together and agreed on how to make it work. The proposal was approved by everyone internally and was ready for signature. My POC told me to fire off the DocuSign to his CFO. 2 days later, a message from their CFO: "Thanks for sending this over. I want to see a deeper discount with buying ___ licenses. Can you tell me what is the best that Gong to do in order to get this signed today?" My initial reaction. Fuming. Not fair. Just bad business. *Deep breath* Instead of trying to argue with their CFO, I went back to my 2 champions. Explained what their CFO responded and asked them how to proceed. Confidently explained how it wouldn't be fair to our existing customers to go any lower and if the team can't move forward, it'd be unfortunate, but we'd have to part ways. They took that conversation back to their CFO and fought for us. 3 days later, closed won for the original. Lessons: 1. Be confident pushing back. If the pricing was already negotiated between teams and finalized, don't roll over. 2. What gives you confidence in holding ground, is that you aren't desperate for any 1 deal. Pipeline solves all problems. Even late-stage. 3. Build strong champions and keep them engaged throughout. Push for live conversations. If they weren't willing to fight, it might have died there.

All it took was one sentence to realize I had won a competitive deal that was over $930,000. And that sentence was: "If [Competitor] is still in the picture, that tells me we don't have a technical win or you're not confident enough in our solution. Let's take a step back and make sure we're solving all of your problems." Their response: "We don't need to do that, but can you get any closer to [Competitor's] price? Cha-ching. Deal won. This is called strip-lining. This all started by them asking me to match the competitors price. So how did we get here? Well, it took 10 months to get to this point. Our price was $930K+ Our competitors price was ~$600k, according to them. But that was standard. We had the premium solution. So I did 2 things: 1. Trapset against the competitor. This means asking questions that go after the competitor's weakness. So when they brought up pain that I knew the competitor wasn't good at, I'd ask how they'd plan to solve for with the competitor given they can't solve for it. That would then be tied back to the business case. Learn your competition to do this well. 2. Clearly articulate why we're the premium solution Sometimes people need to be reminded that you get what you pay for. You need to have a deep understanding WHY you're premium and be able to explain it to someone who doesn't want to pay a premium. This can be your customer service. This can be your intelligence. This can be your dataset. This can be your R&D. etc.. So when you're in a competitive deal, remember to trapset against each competitor differently & tie it to their business case to easily justify the investment.