The 'daily deal’ boom and bust, if nothing else, taught us that consumers will respond to incentives. Deep, short-term discounts are extremely effective with consumers because the consumer generally has full autonomy and decision making authority to make the purchase.

This is not true in enterprise sales. When a seller offers a large enterprise an incentive if they agree to buy on a certain date, the work has only just begun.

I’ve written in the past that, very often, the most difficult part of an enterprise sale isn’t getting an enterprise to buy, it’s getting the enterprise to buy now, or to buy on the seller’s timeline.

To help with this, here are four questions a seller can ask themselves to be sure that the incentive they’re offering is going to work:

Does the buyer believe in the incentive? Gimmicks don’t scale. Incentives must be legitimate and make sense. There are all kinds of legitimate reasons why a seller wants a buyer to buy sooner rather than later. The seller should communicate these legitimate hooks to the buyer in a sincere and logical way. If it doesn’t make sense to the buyer then they won’t respect the seller’s timeline.
Does the buyer care about the incentive? Incentives that sound great to the seller may not always sound great to the buyer. Sellers should take the time to dig in and discover how impactful the incentive is to the buyer. It's helpful to say something like, “if this deal closes by the end of the quarter I can offer you a 20% price reduction. I understand that it may be challenging to move this through your process on such a short timeline, so is this something that’s important enough to you to accelerate this deal?"
Does the buyer understand their own buying process? A buyer’s job most likely is not to buy things. They have their own set of priorities to worry about and they may have no idea what it takes to get a contract signed within their own organization. It’s hard for big companies to buy things. Sellers should be aware of this and push their buyer to be sure they understand their own buying process. A buyer can’t agree to buy on a seller’s timeline if they don’t understand what it takes.
Does the buyer have the capability to drive their own buying process and stick to the seller's timeline? While buying decisions are often made at the top, the actual execution of the ‘buy’ often happens at lower levels. Sellers must make sure that the individual that is agreeing to the incentive has the authority to drive the accelerated timeline.

Of course, sellers should always strive to have their product’s core value proposition line up with their buyer's problems to create inherent urgency. But in many cases an incentive may help. Sellers should answer the questions above before they get comfortable that the incentive they’re offering is going to accelerate the deal.