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Reciprocity in Sales

Thomas Waites

You and your prospect need to have a reciprocal relationship.

Many salespeople struggle with this. They have one-sided relationships with their prospects. The salesperson gives, gives, gives and asks for nothing in return. They hope that their giving will eventually result in receiving a signed contract.

It usually won’t. And if it does, the sale will take way longer to close than it should.

What leads to more sales and shorter sales cycles? Reciprocity.

Why Can Reciprocity Be So Hard?

  1. You may have to be disagreeable with your prospect

    • You have to be willing to say ‘No’.

  2. You may face rejection

    • You have to be willing to hear ‘No’.

  3. You have to know what to say ‘No’ to

    • Are they asking for too much? Has the relationship become too one-sided?

  4. You have to know what to ask for

    • What outcome do you need from the interaction? Is this your ask reasonable?

Assertiveness in Sales

Assertiveness is something that I learned in my early twenties. I remember sharing with someone that I learned how to be assertive - they were shocked that I wasn’t just ‘naturally’ this way. I now love teaching and coaching on these learnings. Assertiveness is a gift. It can be the key to unlock what you want in life.

All of my salespeople have probably heard me explain the Passive/Aggressive Continuum more times than they can count. The continuum is most easily understood through my animated explanations with accompanying hand gestures (and whiteboarding, if we’re in-person) but hopefully my 2D blog depiction below suffices.

Passive/Aggressive Continuum:

Passive ————————- Assertive ————————- Aggressive

My team has spent a lot of time and energy working on assertiveness in order to create reciprocal relationships. We’ve made huge improvements here. We’re setting Upfront Contracts consistently, booking next steps at the end of Demos proficiently, being much more direct in our emails, etc. We were struggling with these things so much a few quarters ago that I joked with my Account Executives, “If our prospects were our boyfriends or girlfriends, we’d be in abusive relationships with them.”

Well, I’m pleased to share that we’ve exited the abusive relationships. We’re much, much healthier now. And the team’s results have been impressive! However, we’re still struggling with reciprocity in different areas of our sales process.

I observed these reciprocity gaps. There must have been a root cause that we hadn’t addressed.

Reciprocity Gap

You have to know what you want and need.

In order to be assertive, you have to know what you want and need. Once you know this, you can then act on this assertively. But you can’t act assertively if you don’t actually know what you want or need in a given situation.

I realized that, in many cases, my team wasn’t holding back on asking. They actually just weren’t sure what to ask.

This was our reciprocity gap.

There can be a lot of ambiguity in our prospect’s buying process. We sell SaaS to the largest Enterprise customers in the world (e.g. Coca-Cola, Disney, Warner Bros… to name drop a few). We also sell to non-technical prospects who are usually not experienced software buyers. There’s a lot of internal buy-in and change management required before they can decide to roll out our platform to thousands or tens of thousands of employees. There often isn’t a defined budget (but they do have the ability to secure it). And the procurement process can often be slow as we wait for Legal’s redlines or IT’s security review.

We have defined many opportunities for reciprocity and assertiveness in our standard sales process. As an example, my Account Executives always set an Upfront Contract before Demoing our platform. When we know what to do, we assertively do it.

But the ambiguity of our prospect’s buying process presents a challenge. What we need and want can get a little murky. This can be particularly challenging if we’ve followed our prospect’s buying process and haven’t been able to bend it to match our sales process.

As an aside, when people have gotten into the habit of non-assertive behaviour (often driven by fear of rejection) they actually stop thinking about what they want or need. They self-impose own limitations. This can also be a blocker.

Pre-Call Preparation

To address this, before each call, my team will answer two questions in their pre-call prep note…

  • “What outcome do I want from this call?”

  • “What do I need to ask for?”

If we know what we want and what we need, I know that we’ll get it. Pre-committing to taking actions during calls has been a highly effective strategy for us.

Oftentimes to make a change we just need to simply draw our attention to what we are currently doing and what we ought to be doing instead. We didn’t need coaching on ‘how to ask the question’, we needed coaching on figuring out ‘what to ask for’. If you know ‘the what’, ‘the how’ becomes secondary.

There’s also a natural self-correcting pain that comes when we know we need to do something and we choose not to do it. It hurts when we know what we want and don’t act on it. In my experience, it hurts more than rejection. If we know what we need to ask for and don’t, we’ll feel it when we get off the call and naturally correct next time.

It may also stretch us initially to think of what we want and need heading into those more ambiguous situations. But it will get easier and easier to answer these two questions as we get our reps in.

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