Are you negotiating against yourself?

This Week in The Sales HouseToday at 2pm PT/3pm MT/4pm CT/5pm ET is live Sales Growth coaching. Bring your month-end sales challenges and I’ll walk you through it. Sales Growth Quote of the Day"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn." Gloria Steinem "Are you negotiating against yourself?"One thing we all need to unlearn in our sales career is negotiating against ourselves. It’s worth talking about here in the last week of the month/quarter.When you give a discount to close a deal at the end of the month you’re negotiating against yourself. The extra point, or few points, of discount is almost never the decisive point that convinces the buyer to buy from you instead of your competition.The fact is that most discounts given at closing time are wasted. I call them mindless discounts.Why are you mindlessly sacrificing margin dollars to close a deal on March 31 that is going to close anyway on April 1? I know, I know. You’re doing it to hit your number. To meet the expectations of your bosses. Here’s the problem. The ROI on that month-end discount never pencils out.I once took over a capable sales team that had become dependent on the month-end discount to hit its numbers. They’d trained their prospects to expect a sweetener on a deal if they put off their decision til the end of the month. (Salespeople suffer from situational amnesia. Buyers don’t.)So, one of the first things I did was completely stop the month-end discounting. Cold turkey. We worked deals hard but let them close naturally. If a deal was going to close on April 2 we didn’t discount it to bring it forward into March.The problem was not the buyers. It was us. My team had become over-reliant on the discount to hit their numbers. By extension, my bosses had become dependent on this self-negotiating as well.I put together a simple analysis for my boss, the CEO, that showed the bottom line benefit of stopping the mindless month-end discounting. He bought into my plan even though he knew there would be a few touch-and-go months during which I re-educated and coached my sellers. And my buyers. (And the Board.)When the discount crutch was taken away sellers changed their behavior. And changed the expectations of their buyers in the process.The net effect of stopping the mindless discounts? Our close rates didn’t drop. And gross margins improved across the board.More than anything, this was a mindset change. Removing mindless discounting from your arsenal requires sellers and sales managers to become more mindful about account planning, value selling and deal strategies to achieve better sales outcomes.If you’re dependent on that little end of the month discount to close deals then you’ve got bigger sales issues to deal with.Join the Sales House. I can help you with that.You got this,- Andy Paul