4/9/2025-Mid-funnel negotiating

The best way for sellers to gain negotiation leverage is to qualify the buyer on every sales interaction. You must quickly – and regularly – understand buying intent and fit.

Nothing’s worse than email negotiations, eh?

If you’re having too many of them, it might mean your offering is not indispensable to your prospect.

So, create more value for your customers by determining precisely what they need earlier in the funnel.

Your negotiations can start as early as mid-funnel if your proposals are chock-full of must-haves. Discussing key deal points throughout the cycle will help you avoid losing leverage when the buyer jumps into her/his black hole.

In your next big pitch meeting, go deeper with your qualifying. Find out what your customers define as "irresistible." Ask what you need to do to make your offering – and proposal – precisely what they need and want.

Hint: price/rate is never as important as you think. They’ll find the money for the right proposal.

What about tech integration? …or custom features nobody else will make for them?

Every prospect cares about something different. But they all want to be wowed!

Negotiating is definitely the hardest skill for any seller to develop because of situational variations and consequences… i.e. pressure! Egos and emotions add gas to the fire and make negotiating the most stressful of all selling activities.

However, one thing that makes negotiating in today’s competitive arena exceptionally difficult is email. Buyers hide behind it and use it to make you nervous.

The best way for sellers to gain negotiation leverage is to qualify the buyer on every sales interaction.

You must determine how the buyer thinks about your offering to understand whether buying intent is real. Understanding the seriousness of their desire to do a deal will help you learn when to start talking about deal points.

If there are certain "no deal" terms you wish to establish, introduce those early into the conversation. In turn, probe to learn about the buyer’s "no deal" terms.

Perhaps this convo thread might work for you, "There are a few deal elements we need to stick with, but before I present them, what are your must-haves that we should talk about now?" Once you hear their terms, it’s now appropriate to introduce your "must haves;" for example, "We cannot bend on the contract term…it has to be six months and the reason is X." (And then, explain why your minimum term is six months.)

The best approach to negotiating is to address the hard stuff first. The hard part is to figure out if the terms the buyer presents as "non starters" are truly deal breakers.

Your negotiations don’t usually run like those you see on Shark Tank, but it’s the closest thing we have to watching selling and negotiating.

Check out this 14-year old CEO who has TWO sharks bidding for a piece. What a composed kid…!

(Like you, he probably reads MySalesDay.)