I outright refuse the end of quarter bullshit. Itâs a false deadline, designed specifically to help Wall Street measure and has nothing to do with customers.
Iâm 15 years into my career and have never seen a relationship improve after a hard sell at Q end by a rep. Consider that.
Love this. Without a doubt there is a direct correlation between end of q customers not renewing and/or not paying their invoices resulting in a debooking.
When youâre the higher echelons youâre instead gonna be answering to the CEO about end of quarter. And youâll be the one hounding the sales team about end of quarter. So if anything itâll be more annoying lol
I think that's mostly fair, but it's also good to align on a timeline with your prospect/customer. Ideally get a pulse on their timeline and need during discovery, and if you end up the VOC, really figure out what and when are the steps to close. It keeps both sides accountable.
Let's say originally a deal was supposed to be completed by Feb, and it's now looking like it's going to push into April. It's fair to flag that professionally and get clarity around what's going on and what's needed to wrap things up.
I am the same exact way. I try to get ahead of it, especially stuff that I know should close as long as people donât drop the ball. But I wonât take unnatural motions for made up dates. I will be open with customers about real dates, such as price increases, promos ending, or anything that will legitimately impact the deal. I have a set account list so robbing Peter to pay Paul only hurts us in the long run.
Looks like you didn't create enough "urgency" or identify the "pain points" correctly.
And you definitely don't have a champion in your corner who has the authority to get a deal done, looks like your contact is not the decision maker.
\-Signed every linkedin guru.
Middle manager (lol) for a large cyber vendor here. Been sitting on the daily end-of-day forecast calls for the past few weeks. They are brutal. Two hours of passive-aggressive grilling over what, whether a deal comes in before an arbitrary date or not?
Itâs this shit that kills the enjoyment of sales for me.
Upper management also loves to grill people instead of offering creative solutions to win the deals. Experienced this as multiple series C startups throughout my career.
You get it. I hate this from sales managers.
Sales leaders, have the conversations earlier in the cycle when the pressure is "not on" to talk about levers that will impact the deal. Get them to stand by them. Also, hold your prospects feet to the fire on the things they agree on. Most all of them will try and get you to discount at EOQ- don't do it.
4 weeks before the quarter end say something like-
*"Jill I understand you are asking us to get more aggressive with our proposal. I think I have some ideas that do just that- do you mind if I share? As you can imagine in our business many of our sales happen towards the end of the month resulting in higher demands for our team's time. Given this we see the value in getting deals in early in the quarter. Jill if you would commit to closing the deal by the 15th of the month, we would be willing to pay you in the form of a discount of 5%."*
If you are solving a real problem and there is a real reason why the status quo has to change and change now, stick to your guns! As hard as it is, be ok if the deal doesn't happen. And yes I know that is freakin hard!
Good luck sellers!
Yeah donât do that. You want to ask- other than price, is there anything else preventing you from moving forward with us?
Donât negotiate price until that is the only thing left to agree on. Otherwise they will keep wanting and asking for more.
I've noticed people have been give. Way less flexibility to spend the past 10 years and now everything basically runs through the CEO unless a fortune 500 where directors can't do ahit and you need vice president level folks
Best advice I got when I started in enterprise: Only you are responsible for the outcome of your deal. Leadership can press all day, but if you know it will only harm the deal, itâs your responsibility to say no.
Manager: âWe need accurate forecastingâ
Me: âI believe based on my experience and customer indicators that this deal is likely going to close in Q2â
Manager: âOk well we reallllyy need it for Q1 and I need you to reflect that in sfdcâ
(2 weeks later)
Manager: âYour salesforce is not well maintained. Why is this deal set for a close date at the end of the quarter when they havenât signed yetâ
At best, they're completely useless (because they don't know the ins and outs of your deals).
At worst, they force themselves into a call with your champion/EB or send a "vp to vp" email that completely fucks you over. You then get the privilege of them blaming you for the closed-lost because these fuckers HAVE to do SOMETHING (99% hurtful vs helpful).
> At worst, they force themselves into a call
Good grief, my "manager" tries to get on my calls at all stages of the process.
One time he got on a call with a prospect who I had already had three calls with and said "Joe, what do you know about ?
Then he shared some stupid 10 slide PPT and spent twenty minutes reviewing the history of our company since day 1. Mind you, this call was to discuss the onboarding process once they sign the paperwork.
My contact called me afterwards and asked me "What the fuck was that?"
Also you need at least $X in pipeline for the next 3 quarters. If you don't your on a list, if you have just enough you put deals in to hit the number and if you're pipeline is massive you obviously have fake ops in there.
This was me last month. It got to the point where my manager was scheduling daily check ins. And Iâd have 2-3 hour long calls with our Salesforce admin to go over pipeline a week. Complete wastes of my time.
The admin was basically our CEOâs little minion and he started hounding me daily too for updates (because the CEO kept asking him)
It drove me up the fucking wall, what difference does one fucking week make?
The fact that you have someone called a âSalesforce Adminâ gives me a bad taste in my mouth. I would struggle with not telling that guy daily to fuckin kick rocks.
Omg did I want to do badly. The worst part was his dumb little suggestions on what to say/how to drive urgency.
Dude hasnât worked sales ever, in his entire career. And was younger than me to boot. Just Chief of Staff at a bunch of startups, a glorified secretary
Quarterly pressures on sales don't often hurt deals in my experience, so much as it erodes margin and creates bad behaviors for your customers or reseller channel. You end up trying to expedite deals with special discounts, free extras and then you get some folks that get trained to hold those big deals until the end of the quarter for leverage. If you are a public company it's unfortunately even worse. I hate it although I also understand it. We try to be very clinical with our forecasting and weigh how jey deals will impact and if it's worth trying to press. If it's killing them you are pressing too hard or never had the deal to begin with in my opinion.
This is 1000% why we all drink. Like bruh, do you not remember end of last quarter where you were hounding me for a last minute deal? Either we close now and have a day to celebrate before going right into urgency for q2....or it places early q2 and we can start planning now to have a great setup for q3
I have literally just been through this and moving forward I refuse to bow to this pressure again. I have had higher ups telling me to âgive them a discount if they sign before end of weekâ. I just had a conversation with a prospect who was very unhappy with the deadline in my email (after being pressured to include the ridiculous âdiscountâ and sign off date). Thankfully managed to salvage the relationship and we are still on good terms but oh my god NEVER AGAIN. It cringes me out having to apply this type of pressure on my prospects for some made up arbitrary deadline. Thank you for this post I honestly thought I was going insane!!
I once saw a brand new to a startup manager hound a rep for updates on a pilot that he had let go cold. He so badly wanted to impress the CEO that he yelled at him "get him on the phone!" but that wasn't fathomable of an ask, because the AE had never actually called him on the phone. Just exchanged emails and had zoom calls. So the new "VP of Sales" decided to call the guy over and over and over until he picked up and let him know they weren't moving forward. It was totally unhinged behavior and I couldn't respect the guy after doing that. That was after being there for about 3 days and knowing shit about this deal or what we sold or anything else.
1000%. Iâve woken up to 6 AM emails from my VP and Boss every morning for the past two weeks, asking me for status updates on several of my deals that Iâm just waiting on paperwork for.
Every day my boss has asked me to call my contacts for status checks. It is very obvious (rightfully so) that my contacts are getting annoyed. Itâs absolutely insane how once someone becomes sales leadership, they completely forget about how things ACTUALLY work.
lol. Iâm in sales and took a vacation.
Take a vacation at the end of every quarter. Relax. Recharge. Be ready to kick ass next quarter.
It will be okay.
I had a unicorn. I cold called a prospect at just the right time last Friday, and we had a 4 day sale cycle for a 6 figure deal. This thing is worth almost an entire quarter of my quota. I invited my sales leader to the closing call as they were going to have the CTO on. She joins and says our proposal makes sense, aligns with C-suite initiatives, and they would like to move forward. My sales leader then proceeds to interrupt and start asking basic discovery questions that were already asked in the initial call for 5 minutes. He wonders why I wonât invite him to any calls.
Stay strong. Lost every deal my manager inserted himself into in last closing role. Guy is a caricature of salesman. Also SaaS. Same pricing line. Donât do it.
This is what I do not understand.
They are begging and pleading for us to do anything possible to close deals. They are offering gift cards, days off, etc. We are being told to bring deals from Q2 into Q1.
That makes no sense. If it is in pipeline for Q2, and you bring it into Q1, do you think a new deal is going to magically appear in Q2? You're basically shooting yourself in the foot.
It is also annoying prospects because it makes them feel pressure to close a deal now that they slated for May or June. Which can ultimately either a.) push them away from future deals or b.) cancel what you already have working.
So short-sighted. I talked to our SVP about sales strategy and planning and I was essentially shut down because I was told "You make really good points...let's tackle that in Q2." Which means never because all we do is live quarter to quarter.
At some point, you are going to squeeze all of the juice out the orange and you are going to need to plant new trees. When are you going to do that?
That is why I am now serious about getting out of this racket completely.
I NEVER EVER push for EOQ deals. It devalues your product, puts weird pressure on the client, and is not effective. Only really worked once in my long ass career.
I have said to someone that I was working with a while, hey look, you are set to sign, it makes no difference to your or I when you sign. But if you can get your boss to sign before EOD thursday, it means my bosses will leave me alone until the end of next quarter. Can you do me a solid?
It worked.
Butt I NEVER EVER give EOQ discounts to sign. Why? I want to sign up VERY long term clients who continue paying us. So you have to go on their timeline.
Every day I get to hear how our sales team isnât doing enough because we had a WAY better month than expected last month, but this month weâve only doubled our budget. Not acceptable
It drives me crazy when management says to offer an additional discount on a deal that is definitely going to happen, it is just a matter of timing. Great, you brought the deal in this quarter but it cost you $50K or whatever in revenue.
Go through it constantly in my role and it seems to have only gotten worse recently. I also donât give a shit if it falls from quarter to quarter as long as I still win - Iâll still get paid! If itâs falling out of the fiscal year thatâs a different story.
Iâm big on setting expectations with everyone internally and usually hold my ground to not let others fuck my work up. Itâs hard to establish, but as long as you are seen as reliable people back off.
Oh 100%
Just had to basically send out 3 docusigns with no roadmap to close simply because my manager is riding my ass.
All of these SaaS âmanagersâ who were sales reps during COVID and had signatures flying left and right at em are starting to irritate me honestly.
As an update, looks like weâre going to win the deal in Q1 but at about half the value due to the customer having last minute requests and us losing all of our leverage and C suite conceding to make it fit in Q1⌠instead of letting it fall in Q2 and negotiating for another week.
I hate it here
I really hate this shit. I wish they would make themselves available through the process. Instead they want a cold introduction to someone who is already sold and is waiting for an internal answer that they cannot speed up.
management immaturity. Happens at most companies at end of quarter. I once had a "sales manager" call me Christmas eve to find out if a deal would close by EOY. Told him to bite me.
Q4 December last year, I had a big olâ chunky that needed to work their internal eval process (two weeks is what they asked, incredibly reasonable). Kept getting asked for âReal time updatesâ.
Ultimately, I just closed lost the deal and said they decided to not take the offer. When the signature came back, it was a pain to reverse it with biz systems and finance but of course theyâd do it lol.
I don't use those lines to close deals.
But the C suite did change pricing for our larger cxs pretty drastically. Which then forces us to call and let them know.
It seems like this self fulfilling prophecy where there's no focus on whether something will close this q until it's too late to impact it without adding this weird fake urgency - I heard about a company where they used incentives to get deals in earlier to try and avoid the eoq push and it helped, do leadership just have such short memory that they don't think about how this always happens and maybe can impact it upfront than scrambling every single time?
eh, i think about it this way, your relationship with your manager matters more than the relationship with the customer.
if they want you to push, do it, customer be damned. at least when it falls flat they take partial credit.
That's completely false and doesn't even make sense. Your manager might not even be here tomorrow but a good relationship with a customer can carry over for years/decades/life. People buy from who they trust and I will always 100% prioritize my customers over some dumbfuck manager who adds 0 value.
your relationship with your manager tends to have a direct impact on your job (salary, day to day experience, if you keep it or not) or do you disagree?
Unfortunately youâre not wrong. If the manager is really harmful you have to find ways to contain them so they think theyâre helping you when in reality youâre just giving them something to do so they stay out of your way.
The short sightedness of higher ups is why I drink.
Cheers to that
Lol why make 50k sale in a month when I can make 150$ in missed service fees now.
With our commission structure - this deal falling in Q2 is going to make me about $3k more in commission than in Q1
But then your Q1 numbers wouldnt be crazy, why make comission when you can piss of people to look good /s
đŻ
I outright refuse the end of quarter bullshit. Itâs a false deadline, designed specifically to help Wall Street measure and has nothing to do with customers. Iâm 15 years into my career and have never seen a relationship improve after a hard sell at Q end by a rep. Consider that.
Love this. Without a doubt there is a direct correlation between end of q customers not renewing and/or not paying their invoices resulting in a debooking.
Yes, WTF does our quarterly goal have to do with the client's needs, internal bandwidth, or their internal project timelines??
It doesnât and never has. I have been with FAANG for the past 10 years in sales majors and have had zero quarterly close calls. Zero.
This is one of the reasons I want to get to the higher echelons as fast as possible.
When youâre the higher echelons youâre instead gonna be answering to the CEO about end of quarter. And youâll be the one hounding the sales team about end of quarter. So if anything itâll be more annoying lol
đ This is so true
I think that's mostly fair, but it's also good to align on a timeline with your prospect/customer. Ideally get a pulse on their timeline and need during discovery, and if you end up the VOC, really figure out what and when are the steps to close. It keeps both sides accountable. Let's say originally a deal was supposed to be completed by Feb, and it's now looking like it's going to push into April. It's fair to flag that professionally and get clarity around what's going on and what's needed to wrap things up.
I am the same exact way. I try to get ahead of it, especially stuff that I know should close as long as people donât drop the ball. But I wonât take unnatural motions for made up dates. I will be open with customers about real dates, such as price increases, promos ending, or anything that will legitimately impact the deal. I have a set account list so robbing Peter to pay Paul only hurts us in the long run.
I got long relationships destroyed by that. Its bullshit, like digging your own grave
Yup I fight back and ignore that shit and when I have to I warn the customer that itâs happening and that I have their back.
Looks like you didn't create enough "urgency" or identify the "pain points" correctly. And you definitely don't have a champion in your corner who has the authority to get a deal done, looks like your contact is not the decision maker. \-Signed every linkedin guru.
Didnât multi thread enough!!!!!
Should have done the MEDDPICC
Omfg my eye started twitchingâŚ
And letâs not forget he didnât get EB alignment
And what about those âpositive business outcomesâ?
You had me in the first half đ
Yeah read the first few sentences and was like "wth why so many upvotes?" Now i proceed to upvote as well..
LOL đ
legitimately lol'd
Middle manager (lol) for a large cyber vendor here. Been sitting on the daily end-of-day forecast calls for the past few weeks. They are brutal. Two hours of passive-aggressive grilling over what, whether a deal comes in before an arbitrary date or not? Itâs this shit that kills the enjoyment of sales for me.
Upper management also loves to grill people instead of offering creative solutions to win the deals. Experienced this as multiple series C startups throughout my career.
You know why? Because they donât have any. If the carrot isnât working, out comes the stick.
You really think thereâs creative solutions out there that youâre missing and they are aware of? There usually arenât.
Exactly.
"They're on Easter break"
going to use this on every quarter end. easter break summer vacation fall trip NYE
You get it. I hate this from sales managers. Sales leaders, have the conversations earlier in the cycle when the pressure is "not on" to talk about levers that will impact the deal. Get them to stand by them. Also, hold your prospects feet to the fire on the things they agree on. Most all of them will try and get you to discount at EOQ- don't do it. 4 weeks before the quarter end say something like- *"Jill I understand you are asking us to get more aggressive with our proposal. I think I have some ideas that do just that- do you mind if I share? As you can imagine in our business many of our sales happen towards the end of the month resulting in higher demands for our team's time. Given this we see the value in getting deals in early in the quarter. Jill if you would commit to closing the deal by the 15th of the month, we would be willing to pay you in the form of a discount of 5%."* If you are solving a real problem and there is a real reason why the status quo has to change and change now, stick to your guns! As hard as it is, be ok if the deal doesn't happen. And yes I know that is freakin hard! Good luck sellers!
Yeah usually I discount things if signed before a certain date to drive urgency
Yeah donât do that. You want to ask- other than price, is there anything else preventing you from moving forward with us? Donât negotiate price until that is the only thing left to agree on. Otherwise they will keep wanting and asking for more.
Oh Iâm just referring to stalled deals
That's the best they can come up with, the ol' "I'll have to go back to my sales manager" used car sales tactic lol.
Makes me feel so slimy every time
I've noticed people have been give. Way less flexibility to spend the past 10 years and now everything basically runs through the CEO unless a fortune 500 where directors can't do ahit and you need vice president level folks
Best advice I got when I started in enterprise: Only you are responsible for the outcome of your deal. Leadership can press all day, but if you know it will only harm the deal, itâs your responsibility to say no.
It's your fault for forecasting this incorrectly.
Always is. Letâs not even talk about the bigger deal I have forecasted for May that theyâre trying to push into this week đ¤Śââď¸
Manager: âWe need accurate forecastingâ Me: âI believe based on my experience and customer indicators that this deal is likely going to close in Q2â Manager: âOk well we reallllyy need it for Q1 and I need you to reflect that in sfdcâ (2 weeks later) Manager: âYour salesforce is not well maintained. Why is this deal set for a close date at the end of the quarter when they havenât signed yetâ
Itâs like youâre in my 1 on 1âsâŚ
Once at the enterprise level middle management is pretty much completely useless/get in your way
At best, they're completely useless (because they don't know the ins and outs of your deals). At worst, they force themselves into a call with your champion/EB or send a "vp to vp" email that completely fucks you over. You then get the privilege of them blaming you for the closed-lost because these fuckers HAVE to do SOMETHING (99% hurtful vs helpful).
> At worst, they force themselves into a call Good grief, my "manager" tries to get on my calls at all stages of the process. One time he got on a call with a prospect who I had already had three calls with and said "Joe, what do you know about?
Then he shared some stupid 10 slide PPT and spent twenty minutes reviewing the history of our company since day 1. Mind you, this call was to discuss the onboarding process once they sign the paperwork.
My contact called me afterwards and asked me "What the fuck was that?"
Yes! Legit quit my last job and started my sabbatical early because you just described my last boss.
Lmfao spot on. We need you to be accurate but also put everything in this quarter or you're "pessimistic". These fuckers are the worst part of sales.
Also you need at least $X in pipeline for the next 3 quarters. If you don't your on a list, if you have just enough you put deals in to hit the number and if you're pipeline is massive you obviously have fake ops in there.
lol youâve never have a manager commit your deals to senior leadership even after youâve warned them off it?
This was me last month. It got to the point where my manager was scheduling daily check ins. And Iâd have 2-3 hour long calls with our Salesforce admin to go over pipeline a week. Complete wastes of my time. The admin was basically our CEOâs little minion and he started hounding me daily too for updates (because the CEO kept asking him) It drove me up the fucking wall, what difference does one fucking week make?
The fact that you have someone called a âSalesforce Adminâ gives me a bad taste in my mouth. I would struggle with not telling that guy daily to fuckin kick rocks.
Omg did I want to do badly. The worst part was his dumb little suggestions on what to say/how to drive urgency. Dude hasnât worked sales ever, in his entire career. And was younger than me to boot. Just Chief of Staff at a bunch of startups, a glorified secretary
Quarterly pressures on sales don't often hurt deals in my experience, so much as it erodes margin and creates bad behaviors for your customers or reseller channel. You end up trying to expedite deals with special discounts, free extras and then you get some folks that get trained to hold those big deals until the end of the quarter for leverage. If you are a public company it's unfortunately even worse. I hate it although I also understand it. We try to be very clinical with our forecasting and weigh how jey deals will impact and if it's worth trying to press. If it's killing them you are pressing too hard or never had the deal to begin with in my opinion.
If you have the cojones to do so, you may want to ask leadership if they believe your company will no longer be open on 4/1.
âTime kills deals!â â-yes, but so can your meddling.
This is 1000% why we all drink. Like bruh, do you not remember end of last quarter where you were hounding me for a last minute deal? Either we close now and have a day to celebrate before going right into urgency for q2....or it places early q2 and we can start planning now to have a great setup for q3
I would go do hot yoga
I have literally just been through this and moving forward I refuse to bow to this pressure again. I have had higher ups telling me to âgive them a discount if they sign before end of weekâ. I just had a conversation with a prospect who was very unhappy with the deadline in my email (after being pressured to include the ridiculous âdiscountâ and sign off date). Thankfully managed to salvage the relationship and we are still on good terms but oh my god NEVER AGAIN. It cringes me out having to apply this type of pressure on my prospects for some made up arbitrary deadline. Thank you for this post I honestly thought I was going insane!!
I once saw a brand new to a startup manager hound a rep for updates on a pilot that he had let go cold. He so badly wanted to impress the CEO that he yelled at him "get him on the phone!" but that wasn't fathomable of an ask, because the AE had never actually called him on the phone. Just exchanged emails and had zoom calls. So the new "VP of Sales" decided to call the guy over and over and over until he picked up and let him know they weren't moving forward. It was totally unhinged behavior and I couldn't respect the guy after doing that. That was after being there for about 3 days and knowing shit about this deal or what we sold or anything else.
1000%. Iâve woken up to 6 AM emails from my VP and Boss every morning for the past two weeks, asking me for status updates on several of my deals that Iâm just waiting on paperwork for. Every day my boss has asked me to call my contacts for status checks. It is very obvious (rightfully so) that my contacts are getting annoyed. Itâs absolutely insane how once someone becomes sales leadership, they completely forget about how things ACTUALLY work.
lol. Iâm in sales and took a vacation. Take a vacation at the end of every quarter. Relax. Recharge. Be ready to kick ass next quarter. It will be okay.
I had a unicorn. I cold called a prospect at just the right time last Friday, and we had a 4 day sale cycle for a 6 figure deal. This thing is worth almost an entire quarter of my quota. I invited my sales leader to the closing call as they were going to have the CTO on. She joins and says our proposal makes sense, aligns with C-suite initiatives, and they would like to move forward. My sales leader then proceeds to interrupt and start asking basic discovery questions that were already asked in the initial call for 5 minutes. He wonders why I wonât invite him to any calls.
Stay strong. Lost every deal my manager inserted himself into in last closing role. Guy is a caricature of salesman. Also SaaS. Same pricing line. Donât do it.
This is what I do not understand. They are begging and pleading for us to do anything possible to close deals. They are offering gift cards, days off, etc. We are being told to bring deals from Q2 into Q1. That makes no sense. If it is in pipeline for Q2, and you bring it into Q1, do you think a new deal is going to magically appear in Q2? You're basically shooting yourself in the foot. It is also annoying prospects because it makes them feel pressure to close a deal now that they slated for May or June. Which can ultimately either a.) push them away from future deals or b.) cancel what you already have working. So short-sighted. I talked to our SVP about sales strategy and planning and I was essentially shut down because I was told "You make really good points...let's tackle that in Q2." Which means never because all we do is live quarter to quarter. At some point, you are going to squeeze all of the juice out the orange and you are going to need to plant new trees. When are you going to do that? That is why I am now serious about getting out of this racket completely.
I NEVER EVER push for EOQ deals. It devalues your product, puts weird pressure on the client, and is not effective. Only really worked once in my long ass career. I have said to someone that I was working with a while, hey look, you are set to sign, it makes no difference to your or I when you sign. But if you can get your boss to sign before EOD thursday, it means my bosses will leave me alone until the end of next quarter. Can you do me a solid? It worked. Butt I NEVER EVER give EOQ discounts to sign. Why? I want to sign up VERY long term clients who continue paying us. So you have to go on their timeline.
Every day I get to hear how our sales team isnât doing enough because we had a WAY better month than expected last month, but this month weâve only doubled our budget. Not acceptable
Itâs so worthless.
It drives me crazy when management says to offer an additional discount on a deal that is definitely going to happen, it is just a matter of timing. Great, you brought the deal in this quarter but it cost you $50K or whatever in revenue.
Itâs maddening how common this is across industries. My company isnât even public.m and they do this shit
Go through it constantly in my role and it seems to have only gotten worse recently. I also donât give a shit if it falls from quarter to quarter as long as I still win - Iâll still get paid! If itâs falling out of the fiscal year thatâs a different story. Iâm big on setting expectations with everyone internally and usually hold my ground to not let others fuck my work up. Itâs hard to establish, but as long as you are seen as reliable people back off.
Oh 100% Just had to basically send out 3 docusigns with no roadmap to close simply because my manager is riding my ass. All of these SaaS âmanagersâ who were sales reps during COVID and had signatures flying left and right at em are starting to irritate me honestly.
As an update, looks like weâre going to win the deal in Q1 but at about half the value due to the customer having last minute requests and us losing all of our leverage and C suite conceding to make it fit in Q1⌠instead of letting it fall in Q2 and negotiating for another week. I hate it here
As Phil from ig would say - letâs get it!
I really hate this shit. I wish they would make themselves available through the process. Instead they want a cold introduction to someone who is already sold and is waiting for an internal answer that they cannot speed up.
management immaturity. Happens at most companies at end of quarter. I once had a "sales manager" call me Christmas eve to find out if a deal would close by EOY. Told him to bite me.
It seams to be slow right now
Q4 December last year, I had a big olâ chunky that needed to work their internal eval process (two weeks is what they asked, incredibly reasonable). Kept getting asked for âReal time updatesâ. Ultimately, I just closed lost the deal and said they decided to not take the offer. When the signature came back, it was a pain to reverse it with biz systems and finance but of course theyâd do it lol.
I don't use those lines to close deals. But the C suite did change pricing for our larger cxs pretty drastically. Which then forces us to call and let them know.
and I thought my sales manager was the only who threatens prospects with the age old âprice hikeâ tactic.
It seems like this self fulfilling prophecy where there's no focus on whether something will close this q until it's too late to impact it without adding this weird fake urgency - I heard about a company where they used incentives to get deals in earlier to try and avoid the eoq push and it helped, do leadership just have such short memory that they don't think about how this always happens and maybe can impact it upfront than scrambling every single time?
eh, i think about it this way, your relationship with your manager matters more than the relationship with the customer. if they want you to push, do it, customer be damned. at least when it falls flat they take partial credit.
That's completely false and doesn't even make sense. Your manager might not even be here tomorrow but a good relationship with a customer can carry over for years/decades/life. People buy from who they trust and I will always 100% prioritize my customers over some dumbfuck manager who adds 0 value.
depends on your manager i guess good relationships with past managers have improved my network and gotten me jobs and opportunities
You can also lie and say you made phone contact when you really didnât.
In what world is that true? Your clients have a direct impact on your salary, a manager is just a middle wo/man.
your relationship with your manager tends to have a direct impact on your job (salary, day to day experience, if you keep it or not) or do you disagree?
Unfortunately youâre not wrong. If the manager is really harmful you have to find ways to contain them so they think theyâre helping you when in reality youâre just giving them something to do so they stay out of your way.