Are We Having Fun Yet?

I was in the middle of negotiating a multi-million dollar deal to develop a custom communications product for a Fortune 500 company.

We were nearing the end of Day 2 of the negotiations, and everything was going well.

I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Unfortunately, that light was the proverbial train approaching me at top speed.

At the end of that second day, I received a call from one of the founders of the start-up where I was VP of Sales.

He called to say that our Engineering and Operations teams had made a “slight” math error in calculating our costs for the project.

As a result, we needed to increase our proposed price by roughly 50%. Without the price increase our CEO and Board wouldn’t sign off on the deal.

Telling the Senior VP of a Fortune 500 firm at the 11th hour and 59th minute that we had to increase our prices by 50% was one of the most terrifying, embarrassing and humiliating moments of my sales career.

It was also one of the most fun. (Once we got past the customer fully exercising his vocabulary of obscenities and physically throwing us out of his office.)

24 hours later we closed the deal.

However, at the time, I had no idea how we were going to re-engage with the buyer and re-establish any semblance of trust that would enable us to move forward again.

That’s where the fun came in.

There’s no playbook for how to recover from a major mistake like that. There’s no process to tell you what steps to take when you’ve given your buyer every reason to hate you.

You have to figure it out. And you have to do it quickly.

You have to be creative and exercise every relationship sales skill you possess to just get back in the door.

Isn’t that what we live for in sales? The opportunity to engage in a meaningful way with other people that doesn’t involve some soul-sucking, rote transactional sales process?

If you’re in sales you’ll learn that crazy shit like this, beyond your control, happens all the time.

Mistakes, unexpected twists and turns, trial failures, product glitches, and much more are just part of the game.

You can feel defeated by these moments and shrink from the stress of the unknown.

Or you can rise to meet the toughest of challenges with a smile on your face and learn how to win when the odds are against you. Which is a lot of fun.

- Andy Paul