Withholding price creates uncertainty and makes potential buyers disengage. Providing a price range upfront helps buyers self-qualify, preventing wasted time for both parties and turning qualified prospects into internal champions who can find the right budget holder.

After a promising sales call, combat 'happy ears' by feeding your meeting notes into an AI. Ask it to identify the top three reasons the deal might *not* go through. This provides an unbiased third-party analysis, revealing red flags and potential objections you can address proactively.

Most marketing avoids negativity, but proactively addressing your product's flaws or top churn reasons is a powerful strategy. It disarms skeptical buyers who are used to perfect marketing narratives. This transparency builds trust and attracts best-fit customers who won't be surprised by your product's limitations.

Sales conversations often rush to demo a "better" product, assuming the buyer wants to improve. The crucial first step is to help the prospect recognize and quantify the hidden costs of their current "good enough" process, creating urgency to change before a solution is ever introduced.

By proactively asking about potential deal-killers like budget or partner approval early in the sales process, you transform them from adversarial objections into collaborative obstacles. This disarms the buyer's defensiveness and makes them easier to solve together, preventing them from being used as excuses later.

Buyers are often too polite to voice concerns. To get past this, actively ask what parts of the presentation are unclear, challenging, or seem like they won't work. This "leaning into the negative" provides a library of information to tailor your next steps and address their real blockers.

A leader focused solely on closing a deal quickly will often ignore subtle warnings and their own intuition about a prospect. Slowing down the sales process allows time for these 'spidey senses' to surface, helping to vet clients properly and avoid costly, bad-fit relationships.

Instead of hiding information, Todd Capone's "transparent negotiation" advises telling buyers the four levers they can pull for a better price: contract term, volume, timing of cash, and predictability (signing by a certain date). This builds trust and turns negotiation into a collaborative process.

Instead of hiding price until the end of the sales cycle, be transparent from the start. Acknowledge if your solution is at the high end of the market and provide a realistic price range based on their environment. This allows you to quickly qualify out buyers with misaligned budgets, saving your most valuable asset: time.