Loosening Those Year-End Purse Strings

Many if not most salesteams face the hectic annual financial year-end rush as the calender year also draws to a close.

The stories you can tell as your selling career lengthens. Christmas hamper delivery, doorstepping for the Christmas drinks, ‘preferential’ customer gifts. And of course, the biggie, the now-or-never year-end ‘extra-special’ discount.

I was helping someone celebrate with a cheeky whiskey that avoided the stress through a 400k order safely in the bag this week.

Well, the irritating truism is that if you’re relying on crazy discount to bring in your sale right now, you’re not only taking a huge risk that is unlikely to bear fruit, but you also missed a trick way earlier down the line and haven’t done your selling job properly. Ouch.

Yet discount piles will continue to miraculously appear worldwide over the next couple of weeks.

And I must admit that I too in my early days followed this herd.

As although you should ideally create urgency that is not price-cut related, a cost reduction remains a mechanism that can and does stop the pen wavering as its hover finally descends above your dotted line.

There are the usual month-end tricks. Each magnified at year-end.

You alter payment terms. You create a new, 35th day of December on your ledger. You create tantalising ‘once-off bundles’. You promise the securing of key, otherwise un-guaranteed, delivery resource. You throw in tasty little extras.

All conditional on the signature before the New Year’s Eve clocks strike midnight.

Of course, the hardened solution seller will remind the excitable choppers that your prospect will expect the same discount in the middle of January regardless. And also for such pricing to remain in place for any and all future purchases. So never offer such nonsense.

If you find yourself asking the age-old question;

…well, Mister Prospect, what do I have to do to get this deal done this year?

Then at least in one way it is a good qualifier if they answer, “nothing”. Or perhaps they are, as the experienced buyer would, holding out for that panic-induced price-drop-through-the-floor as throats clear for Auld Lang Syne… Where on this scale are your vital year-end deals?