4 Ways to Be a More Audacious Seller

By Tom Searcy

At 29 years of age I stood as a semi-finalist in front of a Fortune 50 company executive team and told them that my company was not going to sell to them. We knew they were using us as column fodder and that they would take our creative ideas and give them to our competitors in the final decision. This was for a $400M contract. The prospect gave us assurances, committed to move us to the top three finalists, and pre-approved our pricing. This immediately jumped us ahead of seven competitors and put us in the final three. We won the deal.

Was it magic? Candidly, at 29 I was still too stupid to know that is not how sales works. My team of nine who made this deal happen was fearless. I don’t think it was magic. It was audacity. I believe that audacity gives you an advantage when selling. Below are four ways you can be a more audacious seller:

1) Be willing to lose.
An inauspicious truth about the deal with the Fortune 50 company is that the owner of our company did not go to the pitch with our selling team. He did not want to be around if we lost. He was afraid to lose. My team and I were not afraid to lose, (actually, we figured we probably were going to lose). You cannot be audacious if you are afraid that you are going to lose. You will hold back on your strongest ideas and your most compelling reasons if you are afraid of “coming on too strong.”

2) Be willing to draw the line.
Not every opportunity is a deal worth pursuing. Salespeople and sales leaders may say they are willing to lose a sale or a customer, but then fret and concede throughout the sales process, only to win a low margin deal. Be willing to draw specific lines around what type of business your company will pursue and stick to your guns. This means having the audacity to forego business that isn’t a fit rather than take it on terms you don’t want.

3) Be willing to tell the ugly truth.
Sometimes the baby is ugly. Ok, that’s a bit of a cliché, but you have to be willing to point out problems you can solve at the prospect company and identify their pain in no uncertain terms, no matter how ugly it might be. You have to enumerate in clear terms why other approaches to resolving the issues will not work. It would be fortunate if the prospect would come to such an understanding on their own, but that is often not going to happen. The Fortune 50 decision team mentioned at the beginning of this article had over 40 people in it! There is no way that hinting was going to work. Bold and loud statements needed to be made to be heard and remembered.

4) Be willing to fight.
I was taught from early on by my mom that you can disagree with someone as long as you do it nicely. I won’t lie–sometimes my family forgot the last part around the dinner table, but the point is you may need friction in order to get traction As an audacious sales professional you will make claims that, by their very nature, disrupt the status quo and shake things up. That means entrenched forces and viable enemies may arise, but that doesn’t mean change isn’t necessary. Creating a “win-win” for everyone involved can be achieved as a long-range reality, but the initial change may require that some habits and individual preferences may have to be sacrificed for the overall greater good of the company.

Often, the reason that salespeople lack audacity is they come from the mindset that “the customer is always right” and that “I want to earn your business.” This is a one-up, one-down structure that will not allow for audacity and in the future represents less value to customers. Buyers want big value. That sometimes means big change. To make big change, you need to sell with audacity.

Tom Searcy is CEO of Hunt Big Sales and author of multiple sales books, including Life After the Death of Selling: How to Thrive in the New Era of Sales. For more information, visit www.huntbigsales.com or follow @tomsearcy.