Year End Discount Frenzies

One of my customers races towards their year end right now.  As usual for most sales-orientated outfits, this signals the bullying or rewarding (depending on your point of view!) of prospects by offering them some kind of incentive to sign up before the year disappears.

“Extra special discount from a pot we’ve managed to get our paws on from a usually unavailable head office source….” is one way how the chat can flow.

Yet most of the reps here are uncomfortable with this.  They focus on getting in tune with prospect buying cycles and have demonstrable success that this appraoch works very well.

As a bunch, they tend to feel promoting such deadlines is not in keeping with how their relationships have been fostered and maintained.  It can prompt irrational buyer behaviour, disrupt the natural decision making flow against them and often causes prospects to back away from them.

So they’ve come up with a plan to avoid all this possible negativity.  They simply say to their potential client that they’re “giving you the option, but it’s totally up to you and is your decision”.

This ‘gentler’ approach one advocate explained to me was responsible for siginifcant results.  Of 12 deals with anticipated sign-up the month beyond year end that were incentivised in this way, a full 6 of them pulled the deal forward to take advantage.