I Crushed My Quota Using These 3 Closing Plays

In this post I’ll share 3 closing plays you can use to crush your quota this year!

I’ve been a full-cycle sales rep for 8 years before getting promoted to sales manager. But in my first year I was seriously questioning if Sales was the right career for me. I missed my first shot at a promotion, but since then I’ve made changes to how I sell.

Changes that are the reason I haven’t missed a quota since then. And if you’d like to know what these are, subscribe to this channel because I’ll keep sharing sales advice that worked for me.

Now let’s jump into those 3 closing tips!

Buy out the competition

Ever found yourself in this situation? You’re working this new deal. Got the tech win on the POC and the buyer decided to move forward with you. But here’s the hickup: they still have 6 months till their contract renewal with the incumbent. What do you do?

Time kills deals and we both know that’s plenty of time for the incumbent to win the customer back. Do you try waving around end of quarter discounts? Discounts that are for sure “a one-time opportunity and you’re definitely not gonna offer it up again next quarter!”? There’s a better way. One that wins you the deal now and protects your margins for future opportunities.

You buy-out the incumbent. Here’s what that looks like:

I was working this 488k deal for 8 months and in Q1 and I thought I had it in the bag. But this buyer still had an active plan until end of August and we only needed 45 days to do the migration. This should’ve been a Q3 deal. The house wasn’t burning and they didn’t want to pay double for the same service. So I asked my champion one simple question:

Say you didn’t have to face sunk costs with your current supplier. Is there anything else that would hold you back from signing the contract this week?

They said no, and I found out the remaining amount on their contract was 90k. So I go approval to discount the deal from 488k to 400k for the first year as an investment into the relationship.

I didn’t label it as a discount. We weren’t devaluing our service. We were taking one step towards the buyer and asked them to meet us half way. Got the signature in 3 days.

We also managed expectations that to renew on the same scope they would have to budget 488k next year.

The tax-break upsell

This next one has to be my favourite end of year closing techniques! And the best thing about it is that it works even if the buyer has no budget left!

You know how businesses pay taxes on their profits each year? Well the smartest of companies know they can invest those profits better than governments can. Might as well make a case to invest in your solution, right? Here’s how it works:

I was working this 126k opportunity where the company took things slow. True to most enterprises. It took them 2-3 months to migrate all their processes over to our platform so instead of paying for resources they wouldn’t use, they told me they’ll start with a smaller scope and expand start of next year. That way they could buy now and didn’t have to apply for additional budget. We started with 80k.

But then September rolled around and I needed that 46k to hit my targets. So again I asked my champion:

With the onboarding going well, are we still on for that scope increase in January?

They said yes. So I made a case to reinvest their profits and upgrade end of year. They’ll get to finish the complete migration sooner and the business would pay that money anyway. Might as well invest in the growth of this product line. Then I asked:

is this a strong year for the business or is every department being asked to cut expenses wherever they can?.

My champion didn’t know but said he’ll ask the higher-ups. Within a week he got back to me saying this is a good year for them so let’s move forward with my proposal to buy early. Got the signature in November.

Closing deals faster async

Now let’s say you have a strong business case. You want to validate that case and discuss budget, but the decision maker’s calendar is fully booked two weeks in advance.

The last thing you want is to lose momentum on the deal between touch points. But being pushy and impatient isn’t exactly helping you get the DM’s good graces, is it? Execs will smell your commission breath a mile away and that’s a surefire way to lose the trust you’ve worked so hard to built. Here’s how I got around this when managing a 124k upsell:

This was an existing customer who started off self-serve spending 3k, then 6k. A year later I expanded them to 20k ARR. They were now moving from 20k to 144k. A big jump, and I only had 2 months left before the end of year! So instead of waiting weeks at a time to move forward I went in heavy on video messages.

I sent my Champion a short “no ask update” each time we made progress with their team. When it came time to get their approval I sent a 5-minute video message on my recommendation. What I was proposing and backing it up with everything we’ve done so far with the team.

Now, I usually don’t recommend discussing price over email and even here I gave them three options just so I don’t disqualify myself. The goal was to enable my champion to make the sale internally - and it worked! They ended up going with the middle option and the deal closed end of November.

And if you also want to make videos part of your closing, check out this next post where I share 5 ways I use videos during my sales cycles! See you there!

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