Latest / Closing the Deal with Fexingo: Sales, Negotiation, and Revenue Conversations for Operators / How Closing Faster Can Lose You the Deal
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a piece of sales advice that sounds so obvious it almost feels rude to question it: close as fast as you can. Luna: And that advice is wrong a lot more often than we admit. Lucas: Specifically wrong, I think, when the prospect hasn't fully justified the purchase to themselves yet. You get a verbal yes, you rush to send the contract, and suddenly the deal goes quiet or the buyer asks for a discount they never mentioned before. Luna: Or worse, they sign and then invoke a rescission clause within the first week. I've seen that happen on a six-figure deal. Lucas: Let's look at a real case from earlier this year, June 2026. A B2B software company — call them DataBridge — was selling a compliance platform to a mid-market financial services firm. The rep, Sarah, had done a solid discovery call, a good demo, and the prospect's head of compliance said, 'This looks like exactly what we need.' Luna: So Sarah sends the proposal that same afternoon. She's thinking capitalise on the momentum. Lucas: Exactly. She attached a standard contract with a 30-day payment term and a note saying, 'Let's get this signed by Friday so we can start implementation next week.' Very common playbook. The prospect said, 'We'll review it.' Then nothing for ten days. Luna: I've been that buyer. You get the contract, you realise you haven't really mapped out the budget, you haven't got internal alignment, and now you feel pressured. So you stall. Lucas: Sarah called on day twelve. The prospect said, 'We're still interested, but we need to loop in the IT director and the CFO, and we're wondering if the annual license can be split into quarterly payments.' That's a classic sign of buyer's remorse before the deal is even signed. Luna: So she lost leverage. Now she's negotiating payment terms instead of value. Lucas: She ended up giving a 10 percent discount just to keep the deal alive. Closed at $360,000 instead of $400,000. And the implementation was delayed by six weeks because IT wasn't looped in early. Luna: What should she have done differently? I'm guessing not send the contract the same day? Lucas: Right. The mistake wasn't closing — it was the speed of closing before the buyer had done their internal work. The best reps I've observed do something counterintuitive: they slow down the close on purpose when they sense the buyer hasn't fully bought in internally. Luna: That's the part a lot of sales training skips. They teach you to overcome objections, but not to diagnose whether the 'yes' is actually a 'maybe'. Lucas: One framework I like comes from a rep I worked with at a cybersecurity firm. He called it the 'three-beat close.' First beat: after the demo and the verbal interest, he would ask a gut-check question: 'On a scale of one to ten, how confident are you that this solves the problem you described in our first call?' Not 'how likely are you to buy' — that's too abstract. He anchors to the problem. Luna: And if they say anything less than an eight, he knows he's got work to do. Lucas: Exactly. Second beat: he would ask, 'Who else needs to be part of this decision for you to feel comfortable moving forward?' He gets the names. Then he says, 'Would it help if we set up a brief call with them together, so you don't have to re-explain everything?' Luna: That's smart. He's not avoiding the stakeholders — he's helping the buyer enroll them. Lucas: Third beat: he would ask, 'If we can get alignment with, is there anything else that would prevent you from signing within the next two weeks?' He builds a timeline that feels spacious but has a natural boundary. And he never sends the contract until the prospect confirms, 'Yes, I'm ready to send this to my team for approval.' Luna: So the prospect basically sells themselves. By the time the contract arrives, it's a formality. Lucas: That's the goal. In Sarah's case, if she had asked that gut-check question, she might have heard the prospect say, 'Probably an eight, but I need my boss to sign off on the budget.' Then she could have offered to join a call with the boss to answer questions. Instead, she bypassed that step and the boss killed the timeline. Luna: It's interesting — the faster you try to close, the more you reveal that you care about your timeline more than their readiness. That can make the buyer distrustful. Lucas: There's research on this. A study from CEB, now part of Gartner, found that B2B buyers who perceive a supplier as 'rushing' are 40 percent more likely to reopen negotiations after signing. They look for reasons to re-trade. Luna: And that's where you get the 'Oh, by the way, we need a 60-day payment term' email two days after they sign. Lucas: So the counterintuitive move is: when you feel the urge to close fast, pause and ask yourself — has this buyer really justified this purchase to themselves and their organisation? If not, your speed is actually creating friction. Luna: You know, this reminds me of something I've been thinking about lately with the show. We put a lot of effort into these episodes — the research, the cases — and we deliberately don't run any ads. No sponsor breaks, no mid-roll interruptions. That's a choice. And if those conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, the only way that choice stays sustainable is listener support. There's a link at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a simple way to say 'this matters' without a big production. Lucas: I appreciate you saying that. And honestly, it ties back to what we're talking about — slowing down, building trust, not rushing the transaction. That principle applies to how we run the show too. Anyway, back to the close. Lucas: Let me give you a concrete example of the slow close working. A friend of mine sells enterprise HR software. His deal size is about $250,000. He had a prospect who said 'yes' in the demo. He could have sent the contract that day. Luna: But he didn't. Lucas: He said, 'Great, I'm glad this resonates. Before I send anything, can we schedule a 30-minute call with your VP of People Ops and the head of IT? I want to make sure the implementation timeline works for their schedules.' Luna: He's basically saying, 'I'm not going to rush you,' which builds goodwill. Lucas: Exactly. They had the call. The VP asked a few technical questions that my friend answered. The head of IT said, 'We have a freeze in Q3, so we'd need to start in October.' My friend said, 'That's fine — we'll do a phased rollout starting in October.' He didn't push back on the timeline. He accommodated it. Luna: And then when he finally sent the contract, it was signed within three days with zero discount requests. Lucas: Zero. Because the buyer had been given space to align internally. The contract was just the paperwork for a decision they'd already made. Luna: So what's the practical takeaway for someone listening right now who's in the middle of a deal and feels the urge to push for a signature? Lucas: Two things. First, use that gut-check question I mentioned. Ask, 'On a scale of one to ten, how confident are you that this solves your problem?' If it's below eight, you have discovery left to do — not closing to do. Second, before sending the contract, ask, 'Who else needs to be part of this for you to feel comfortable?' And then proactively set up that conversation. Luna: So the play is: don't send the contract until the buyer has had a chance to advocate for you internally with your help. Lucas: Exactly. You're not delaying the close — you're ensuring the close sticks. And that's worth way more than a signed contract that unravels two weeks later. Luna: I can think of at least two deals I've been part of where if we'd done that, we'd have saved weeks of back and forth on payment terms. Lucas: The data backs it up. I've seen internal metrics from a few SaaS companies: deals where the rep asked a gut-check question before sending the contract closed at an average of 6 percent higher contract value and had a 20 percent lower churn rate in the first six months. That's not trivial. Luna: So next time you hear a 'yes' and your instinct says 'send the contract now', the smarter move might be to say, 'Let's make sure this is a ten out of ten for you before we move to paperwork.' Lucas: Exactly. It feels slower, but it's actually faster to a clean close. Luna: Alright, that's a solid note to end on. I'm Luna. Lucas: And I'm Lucas. This has been Closing the Deal with Fexingo.