You only have a few more weeks to clean out your pipeline and turn it into revenue. You've not yet hit your sales quota. Yet, prospects at this time will naturally want to push the decision off to next year.
They have many “urgent” last-minute things they want to get done. They also have difficulty getting buy-in from other stakeholders in the organization since they have their own end-of-year things they need to get done.
While the end of the year means more distractions, there’s also more opportunity. Many companies need to use up this year’s budget and finalize next year’s budget. As a result, there’s a 5x increase in spending in the final week of the fiscal year compared to spending in the average week.
Here are six things you can do to push prospects to the finish line!
1. Save Your Prospects Time in the Upcoming Year
The B2B sales process can take months. And for many companies, it’s only getting longer—53 percent of B2B buyers reported that the length of their purchase cycle has increased. You can watch prospects delay deciding or help them finish one more task before the year ends.
There was a reason they wanted to buy: They believed your product could provide value to their business. Tell them if they purchase now, you can help them import their data, invite users, or create a workflow to kickstart January 2024. Otherwise, they’ll waste that month on purchasing or onboarding.
2. Make Them an Offer They Can't Refuse
Run a special end-of-year promotion, or give the prospect a special deal. There are four kinds of incentives SaaS businesses can offer:
- Discount: "If you buy before the end of the year, you'll get a 10% discount, so you'll save [x] dollars next year per seat that you buy now."
- Special features or higher-tier plans: "If you buy now, you're going to get the business version of our product for the basic price plan." This is basically also a discount—the difference is that you increase the value rather than lower the price.
- Buy 1, get 2: "If you buy by the end of the year, you'll get a free seat for every seat you purchase. So if you buy three seats, you'll actually get six seats." Buy 1, get 1 free works for SaaS businesses too :)
- Special services: "If you buy this week, you'll get our Advanced Customer Acquisition training package for free." Think about special support packages, consulting packages, training, onboarding ... whatever it is. Make any kind of special service to help them succeed with your SaaS product free.
However, don’t use discounts as a crutch all the time. According to research by Paddle, while SaaS discounts can help you reach your sales goals, there are drawbacks. Customers who receive aggressive discounts are more price sensitive, churn at a higher rate, and have a lower lifetime value.
The best deals have a limited time frame and target prospects who are on the fence.
If you want to learn how to get more customers without discounts or short-term tactics, get your free copy of our B2B customer acquisition guide for startups!
3. Save Them from Upcoming Price Increases
As your product grows and matures and you offer more value, you'll probably increase its price. Let existing customers and prospects know in advance. This is a great incentive for them to make a quick buying decision so that they can lock in at the current (lower) pricing.
When we increased the prices for our sales CRM in 2015, we grandfathered existing customers and current trial accounts. We also allowed them to add new user seats at the old prices if they did it within 14 days before the price increase. However, after 14 days, they would have to pay the new (higher) prices.
This led to a huge bump in seats sold for Close during the 14 days, and our average customer lifetime value increased by over 10 percent. Customers saved money, and we closed more deals. That’s a win-win.
4. Give Them Exclusive Limited Access
If your product is new or you release a major new plan, you can invite prospects to a limited alpha or beta.
For instance, before we started Close, we ran ElasticSales, an on-demand sales team for startups. We gave ourselves one month to find a customer. Yet, by telling prospects we were running a limited beta with only two spots, we had seven companies that wanted to pay us money in only two weeks.
Tell your prospect:
or
or
or
Limiting access to your product creates scarcity, urgency to make a decision, and enhanced perceived value of your offer.
5. Ask Your Manager to Reach Out (Backchannel Sales)
Have you tried everything and are still at a roadblock? Don’t go at it alone. Get help by asking your manager (or someone else) to follow up with the prospect.
Prospects typically distrust salespeople, assuming that salespeople only want to make a quick dollar. Trying harder to convince them that your solution is valuable and worth buying can backfire. They’ll think, “Of course, what a typical salesperson.” Backchannel sales, or selling by involving other people, works because it can reassure prospects they’re not being tricked or conned.
Having your manager follow up with a prospect is simple. Tell your manager,
Ensure the email contains the context around the deal, the contact details, and the copy-and-paste-ready message so they only need to hit send. That's twenty seconds of their time, and that’s all it takes to close a deal faster.
6. When Nothing Else Works—Ask for a Personal Favor
You’d be surprised how many times salespeople successfully ask the prospect to buy now as a personal favor.
Asking a prospect for help shifts the conversation’s dynamics. They aren’t used to salespeople opening up to them this way. By putting your guard down, they’ll put theirs down too.
Missed Pipeline in December is Your Kickstart in January
With all this pushing to convert your pipeline, never forget that you only want to close successful customers and that lost opportunities in December are fresh opportunities in January.
Follow up like a champ, and you’ll turn many of these postponed deals into big deals next year.
Close Deals Now and Set Up Future Success
Want to pick the brains of 2 successful startup CEOs? Hiten Shah and I created “The ultimate guide to growing your B2B startup from 0 to 1,000+ customers,”—and we’re giving it away for free! We have grown several successful startups from zero and will show you how to do the same, no matter what stage you’re at.
