Every sales person dreads the conversation with a prospect, which starts with some nervous chit chat (as they are likely to at least feel bad about telling you) and ends with something along the lines of “I’m sorry but we are moving forward with another solution”. Your heart will pound and the amygdala/fear based response will be emotional, the sales person may go straight to cutting the price or making the prospect feeling very uncomfortable with rejection based comments, “why didn’t you tell me/I have been trying to contact you etc”.

As Chris Voss will tell you, its not always about price. In fact every “win-back” deal which I have rescued has not been about price. When you hear the news, you need to pause and think about what information you need to gather in the next few minutes – you may only get one shot at this. How you frame it comes down to your personal style. For me personally, I want to understand if the prospect is making the “wrong” decision. If they are choosing a better fit product, then I will walk away (despite any management protestations and pushing to make price reductions).

So I need to know which product/vendor they are planning to go with, have they signed agreements, what is the key reason they decided to move forward with the other product. Once you have these three questions answered, you can make a “do or die” decision.

In one such case I was selling to a “Telco” provider. On a check in call on one of my team’s deals, the customer landed the news that they had gone with our main competitor.  So having paused and allowed the conversation to flow it became clear that crucially they hadn’t signed agreements and in fact they had shared that they were playing hardball on the commercials. They also shared that a key functional gap with our product had been identified (Reporting) and they were looking for a better fit in the competitors product.

I had to make some quick fire decisions. I told them that we had another option (unusually we had two products, one being a high volume Telco specialist product and the other more generic SaaS solution but with a modern UI and crucially better Reporting). So I switched horses. Told them we would walk them through all their use cases and reporting examples and we would validate both for ourselves and the customer that it would meet their needs.

This re-opened the door to effectively a new sales process (internally and externally!) and 3 month proof of concept which allowed us the time to re-affirm our industry knowledge, rebuild trust and ultimately win back the deal with a product which met the client’s needs.

Lessons learned. Be calm and pause when receiving bad news, let the emotional response pass and have the confidence to make judgement calls.