Transcript
How Black Friday could be killing your B2B deals
Hey everyone, it’s me, Stu. It’s Friday, it’s roughly the correct time. This is the Flow State podcast. Welcome back if you’ve listened or watched before, and welcome for the first time if you are new to the show, glad to have you here.
So last week, if you joined me then, we spoke a bit about takeaways from a B2B sales networking event that I went to—challenges and opportunities that are presenting themselves at the close of 2025—and critically, what you can be doing about them to accelerate some momentum in your sales pipeline and hopefully smash your end-of-year targets, whatever they are.
This week, to follow on from that, might seem a little bit left field. We’re going to talk about Black Friday, which is not a huge date in the B2B calendar, but as you will find out as we go through this show, it does have a big impact on whether people are potentially ready to make a decision or not. So I’m going to talk through that and my opinions on the interconnectedness of all sales in a kind of, you know, hopefully not MCU kind of way—I think we’re a bit bored of that—but in a holistic fashion that connects it to our, you know, our normal day-to-day lives, and puts aside some of the technology chat for a change.
Obviously, it’s Black Friday today. Used to be very exciting back in the day when it sort of meant that you could get some great bargains, but I feel like there’s a sort of certain cynicism around the retail sales event now, kind of smelling that in the air a little bit. You know, there’s not really sort of bargains there used to be. There’s a lot of chat about potential price gouging and fixing. I don’t know if you saw the news recently, but a lot of e-commerce retailers are testing personalized pricing based on AI analysis of how much basically they can rip you off for whenever you go to their website. So, you know, the allure of a big sale is definitely not there anymore.
Look, I wanted to talk through this and the key issue here, which is the sort of unifying theme across the last few shows and through a lot of this series, to be honest, as we’ve explored the continuing roll-out of the impact of AI, is trust—trust in each other.
Going back to the very early days of my career in the internet, trust has been hard to build because prior to the internet, if you can remember those days—depending, I don’t know how old you are, but I can just remember them, you know, if I squint hard enough into the distance—before the internet, you used to have to go somewhere and buy something and look someone in the eyes and, you know, do it old school style. You know, be like, “Does this seem like a sort of greasy sales situation? Does this person seem like they know what they’re talking about?” Or, you know, if you’re like me, you just ignore all that and just go in and do whatever you were going to do. But the point is, look, you had to go somewhere and have some human interaction.
When the internet launched and when e-commerce became massive, building trust was hard because you don’t know where you’re buying from. We’re all really comfortable with this now because the internet’s been around for a long time. We’re all happy with drop shipping and, you know, the global economy is sort of very well connected now, so the trust has increased quite dramatically. But back in the day, like, it wasn’t there at all, and you would never dream of chucking your, you know, well, I would because, you know, I’m a trier of new things, but a lot of people wouldn’t dream of chucking their card details into some like rando website. And, you know, if you were anyway involved in the eruption of crypto, that sort of attitude resurged a little bit because, you know, nobody really knows like where that’s all going, but that’s a conversation for another time.
So, the reason that trust is so important is because, going back to what I was talking about last week, building a consensus inside a buying group—you know, if you’re selling B2B, you’ll know this, depending on the industry you’re in and the sort of nature of the sales that you’re doing—building trust with people is essential to even, you know, get your foot in the door and have a voice that can be heard and has some sort of level of credibility in those conversations. The industries that we work in are very complex and often highly regulated, so, you know, there’s a level of people expect you to do the table stakes, but you’ve got to be credible and you have to appear trustworthy. Or, I say you have to appear, you have to appear trustworthy to start with, and then you have to be trustworthy afterwards.
So, how does all this relate back to Black Friday, I hear you asking slash get on with it Stu? So let me tell you. As you can see, I’ve got my trusty notepad now, I’m back, I’m back with the old school approach.
As I was saying, Black Friday used to be a great time when you could just get a bargain, right? Everyone would hold off. You know, it’s the start of the Christmas shopping season in the US—I’m talking about the modern use of Black Friday, by the way, not the plague related or any other past versions of it. You know, it’s grown to this huge global date in the retail calendar, which I don’t think any of us really like. Retailers don’t like it because, you know, they basically lose money on this stuff, and we don’t like it because, you know, it’s just yet more noise and more just buy stuff chat through the year.
However, the issue now that we’ve seen over the past year or so is that these kinds of sales—there’s a cynical edge entering into a lot of them. It’s not even entering, it’s there now, right? All to do with price fixing and price gouging. So you’ve probably seen the news about this or you may have read something about it, where a lot of particularly e-commerce websites will push their prices up prior to a big sale event. Black Friday is obviously a big one, where you’ll see prices kind of creeping up and there’s a lot of people building like little price trackers for themselves to check the trends. But what they’re doing is, you know, they’re normalizing higher prices now, and then you’ll get a big discount on Black Friday, but what they’re actually doing is dropping it down to like either a normal retail price, so they can carve some money back, or it’ll be a price that’s actually higher than you would pay in a normal sales event or like an end of line discount or an end of tax year or whatever.
So, you know, as us as consumers, we’re now distrustful of retailers. While all this is probably coming from a good place, because as a retailer you get absolutely screwed over on these sales events because you either discount stuff so that you get some revenue coming in, or you don’t discount stuff and you just don’t sell anything, so like it’s they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. But I still don’t agree with this solution.
Look, what they’re doing is they’re putting that problem onto us and saying, “Well, if you don’t check the prices, that’s your problem, you know, consumer, right?” But now there’s so many sales and there’s so many places to buy stuff that becomes like a job in itself, and that, you know, it’s just wearing to have to do this stuff, right? So a lot of the chat I see in the sort of circles that I’m involved in, like people are just like, “Just forget about Black Friday, we’ll just, you know, just buy stuff whenever you’re going to buy it.” Like it’s become a kind of non-event that there’s so much effort put into it that like it just seems like ridiculous that it that it still happens in this fashion.
Look, that lack of trust in the relationship between the buyer and the seller—like obviously there’s always a bit of a healthy distrust, I would say, but that’s how you get a good deal, right? Like there’s a classic saying of like a good deal’s when nobody’s happy, right, which is which is what you’re aiming for. But the balance of the mistrust is extreme now because we just don’t trust anybody. We don’t trust discounts, we don’t trust the suppliers, we don’t trust the advertising, so that all washes into our lives as B2B people in our jobs, right? You know, our day-to-day lives what shape our approach to how we’re approaching work, right? And when you’re in a group of people who are all sharing that weariness and sort of suspicion of what’s being presented to you, that is what you as a salesperson in a B2B job are coming up against. And like that’s not, it’s not because of anything you’re doing, it’s because of, you know, our lives and the things that are constantly getting thrown at us.
So that additional challenge, I just wanted to call out because everybody bangs on about how you need to build trust, you know, buyers need to trust you, but you’re fighting a battle on multiple fronts that you, you know, you have very limited control over, right? You can only do what you can do from your company and, you know, the things that you’re doing, but you just don’t know how much this stuff’s impacting people. I’ll come on to how I think you can address this in a positive fashion at the conclusion of this session, but that to me is the biggest issue.
So, you know, that, as I was saying, that sort of suspicion, the suspicion of the deal, is what comes into our lives in B2B because that’s what’s happening as happening us happening to us in our lives as consumers, and you can’t separate the two as much as you’d like to.
Look, that that’s a major issue and I think the challenge that we have particularly—so, you know, we do a lot of work with the software industry, with software technology, computer technology, and obviously I built software products myself as well, so I have an acute awareness of this issue—is you know, software in and of itself is challenging because it’s not you’re not buying a physical thing, right? You’re buying an intangible something. It’s sold on the value and the utility that you buy. It’s not like buying a washing machine where you’re like, you get a thing, it does a job, you know, nobody really cares about all the bells and whistles of washing machines, right? You just want your clothes to be cleaned in a reasonable amount of time with the minimal amount of energy use possible.
Whereas, you know, software, because of the way we buy it now, and like I was saying this before in the last session, you know, we’ve nobody owns anything, right? Everything’s a subscription, a license, whatever, and there’s there’s perfectly valid reasons for that in some circumstances. But the challenge with selling that stuff is like when you are buying into something on the license basis, I feel like you can have more confidence. When you’re buying into it on the sort of subscription or SaaS basis, the, you know, the contract we’re agreeing to is that, you know, we’re going to deliver utility and value for the period that you are a customer.
But all these things, you know, are fed into from our what I was saying, you know, the suspicion, the lack of trust. Like, do we have, you know, me as a vendor, do I have your best interests at heart? Am I going to be there to provide this utility? You know, can you rely on me? Like these are like big questions that it’s very hard to answer when you’re selling like a sort of complex piece of technology.
The challenge that a lot of sort of software and technology vendors have is that because we work in an incredibly fast-paced industry where things like AI can come out of nowhere and, you know, can start to sort of change the nature of the game very rapidly, and also because the nature of technology changes so fast, there are things that can dramatically affect the nature of our relationships and can change the deal midway through, which nobody wants and nobody’s planning to have happen, but can happen. So, again, building trust around those things, like you have to fall back on our like human relationships, and it’s a theme that I’ve spoken about a lot throughout this current series, but that’s like that’s the way to to build it.
You know, you can’t you don’t just come in, you know, like love bomb someone and then disappear, like you can’t do that anymore. Like I think people just expect more, quite rightly, from vendors, because that’s what we’re not getting in so many other areas of our lives as as consumers or what we used to refer to ourselves as as customers, which is much nicer.
Look, I think there’s three big—I just want to talk about like three big sort of macro factors that are affecting all of us that feed into this situation and why events like Black Friday are sort of pressure points for this stuff. What used to be back in the good days, you know, when the economy was all on the up and up, sales, you’re like, great, consumer confidence is high. People spend a lot of money.
At the moment, there’s three big things that are affecting all of us and putting a lot of mental pressure on us all, whether you’re sort of aware of that or not.
The first is the cost of living crisis. I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but in Australia we’re feeling the burn of that quite significantly. You know, we’re like a relatively well-off country, but even people who are, you know, sort of doing all right don’t feel like you’re doing all right because everything’s so expensive everywhere. And it’s the same in the old country in the UK, and I know from obviously talking to my business partner and our contacts in the US, it’s very similar over there. Everything is expensive. There’s so many costs that are outside of our control that like we have to spend money on, right? That like that’s just really damaging our ability to sort of, you know, happily chuck money away on random crap during Black Friday, for example.
While, you know, while at work you’re not spending your own money, anyone who has any sort of care for the for their job that they’re doing or the company or their team has some level of, you know, empathy for the fact that no, you’re not spending your own money, but if you make a bad decision, you might blow back on you and it might also destroy your own credibility inside your company. So the end result of all this stuff is incredible price sensitivity. When a huge sale event comes along like Black Friday, at the moment for me, it’s having the exact opposite effect that it’s supposed to because everyone, as I was saying earlier, everyone’s now so suspicious of the deals that they’re getting that it just makes you even more hyper aware of the potential price you should be paying for everything. And even if it’s just one thing, you know, so trying to buy a new TV or whatever, that price sensitivity just washes into everything you’re doing. We had a, you know, a recent issue down here which I’ll talk about in a second that that fed directly into that.
So, that’s the first big factor. The second big factor is the whole price gouging price fixing situation. You know, we’re all slightly suspicious that we’re getting overcharged for things. I was commenting on a post that my old boss Gary Nissen made on LinkedIn about the recent deal between Adobe and Semrush or Semrush, if you prefer, who’ve just been acquired for some ridiculous amount of money, which was definitely overpriced. But look, they were happy to pay it for some reason.
But look, the the price fixing situation issue just breeds mistrust. We’ve had a couple of incidents that are like in those areas I was just speaking about where we can’t control things, right? So if you’re in Australia, you would be familiar with the Kohl’s Woollies, you know, price fixing dramas that have been going on. For those of you that are not Australian or haven’t been to Australia, Kohl’s and Woollies are the two biggest supermarkets down here. They effectively have a duopoly strangle hold on the supermarket industry. The next biggest competitors are people like IGA and Aldi, who are like, you know, the bargain option and the independently owned option. But Kohl’s and Woollies, there was a big sort of furore about it because they, you know, we found that they were all sort of conniving on pricing things similarly, pushing prices up and then discounting them, you know, in their two for one offers and stuff. And this this is on things that like we have to go and buy, right? They were screwing all of them over, and you’re like, these are companies that are making millions of dollars a year, you know, screwing over the agriculture industry, doing what they used to do in the UK, just like, you know, putting the thumb screws on everyone that that supplies them and then driving costs up for us as an end consumer because they want to make a ton of money.
So, you know, that situation—and look, I’m not obviously I’m not against people making money, but the disparity between the amount of money that the shareholders in these businesses make and you or I could make is ever increasing and it’s just there’s a sort of disgusting gap there that like I think is what, you know, grinds all of our gears basically, but again, conversation for another time.
So, that’s the second point: price fixing, price gouging, mistrust. We all assume that’s happening in sales now, and that first point, cost of living, we’re all very price sensitive, we’re all concerned about what we should be paying and what we have to pay, and, you know, watching our wallets because they’re like alarmingly empty at the moment.
Look, the third factor I think, especially when you’re selling online, and referring to both B2B and B2C, is the dream versus reality gap, which is a phrase I’ve coined this morning. The reason that I say that is because I was reading a terrible startup idea in some Reddit thread where this person was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve just got loads of like AI images, I’m chucking them all on this e-commerce website. Do you think people will will buy stuff?” And I was like, you know, when you’re like, look, I’m trying to be more positive this year, and I was like, give everyone a chance. I was like, man, that idea is like such garbage, that idea. And then the next one I saw was someone who’d launched this awful idea about like using AI to generate password hints so you can try and recover a password that you’ve forgotten, like you’re just going to chuck all your private, you know, questions and personal information into an AI tool to try and help you guess a password for an account or something.
But look, I was like, look, this this dream versus reality gap. The issue here is, I think—and this is partly due to the rise of e-commerce—like what you see online is often not what you get, right? And you’ll see this from a lot of the amusing, you know, sort of particularly around like Shein and Temu and like Ali and stuff, where the sort of dream versus reality, like I ordered this and here’s what it looks like on me stuff, is a great example of that. But it’s particularly pertinent again in the industries that we’re in, like, you know, technology, software, like these intangible products.
You know, there’s a danger when you’re selling stuff that you tend to, you know, just lean in, and I think people do this in a in a sort of positive way, they don’t mean to mislead people necessarily, but you tend to just try and be like, “No, we can do everything you want, we can solve all your problems, you know, like just give us give us the money and this will change your life at this company”. And you’re like, it doesn’t really, you know, nothing nothing’s that dramatic, right? But that’s what gets sold to you. And then you don’t want to generate the immediate output of that, which is, you know, buyer’s remorse, where, you know, you bought your, you know, like latest pair of fancy shoes and they fall apart a month later just outside of the warranty period. You know, like nobody wants that, because that’s brand destroying.
Look, I think those three things for me are having a really big impact on our ability to generate any kind of, you know, sort of significant traction and momentum at the moment. And this link, I don’t think people talk about enough, between our normal lives as people, you know, just trying to survive in what people refer to as late stage capitalism—and I don’t agree with that characterization because you don’t know how late latest late stage capitalism might be, like you don’t know what people are going to turn into capital yet—that is hard, right? And we’re all trying to sell in that environment and that is hard.
So, to me, the way to address that is to come right back to, look, remember we’re all just people just trying to get by in this situation. These are some areas that we really focus on, and this is where I wanted to sort of pull back around to the primary focus for, you know, obviously Flow State in my own businesses, which is building that trust between people because we sell intangible products. You know, we sell—they’re obviously tangible to the point where you’re using them, but the value is intangible because there is an education piece there, there’s an application to your use case piece that if we just don’t bother telling people, they’re not going to they’re not going to know, right? We used to have this problem in my previous SaaS business where we naively built it, we assume people just know what to do with it and like, “Oh, like our customers are smart people, they know what they’re doing.” But then people just started trying to do all this crazy stuff with it that we’d never planned for. And then we stood out from the crowd because we spent time talking to them and helping them to understand what they could do and them, you know, taking the time to listen to what they wanted to do so that we could work out whether it was useful or not or whether it was appropriate or not. Which is not hard stuff, it’s not rocket science.
But, look, I wanted to just talk about stuff that you can do and the things that we do, obviously, in order to sort of address this trust gap. How do you like, how do you address that? How do you sort of start in a better place in order to build a relationship that’s built more on like understanding what people want first and foremost?
Now, the way that we approach that is, we—our business is built on three or four sort of core pillars, and I’m going to talk about one of them, which is buyer group intelligence. Now, what that means is when we put together a, you know, an engagement, a campaign, a program for someone, we start from building out the buyer group that you were trying to sell to. So you’ve got your ICP and your target market—that’s all your basic thermographic demographic numbers, facts, blah blah blah stuff. Like you got the broad picture of who you want to target and where.
What we then do is we say, “Right, okay, who’s in your buying group in these companies?” And the kind of businesses that we work with, there might be quite big buying groups, right? Like could be up to 20 people or 30 people in some of them in in larger orgs. Where we start is we start by mapping that out and saying, look, like, you know, if you’ve ever done like Miller type stuff, that this would be familiar territory, but your buyer group roles are pretty standard. It’s your obviously your key decision maker or your, you know, your main point of contact. You might have one, might have two, could be three, they’re the people who you’re talking to day-to-day to try and, you know, get your get your deal across the line, right? Then you’ve got your influencers who are people that are going to be peripherally involved who are influencing the decision internally. You might speak to them, you might not, you might not know who they are unless you talk to us. You’ve then got your champions. So these are different two key decision makers. They’re not like necessarily making the decision, but they are people that love you, they love your service, they love your product, whatever, they’re there to like big you up. You’ve also got your, you know, your financial buyer or your budget controller. You’ve got your blockers—people who, you know, are there just to come in and say no at some random point. And then there’s a few other sort of peripheral roles around that like some have exec stakeholders, there’s some sort of sub roles, but those are the core of any buying group, right? And what we want to do is we want to fill all those roles and we want to understand who’s in them and then where buyer group intelligence comes in—it sounds a bit like sort of cold, but it isn’t—is we want to build an empathetic relationship with these people, right?
The way that we approach this is—and this is where AI we use in a really positive fashion, I think—is once we’ve identified those roles and the people that fit in those roles, we can then start to do a bit of, you know, professional digging around, okay, well, what are the pressures on those people? What are the pressures on their jobs this year? What has been happening that we can find out? Are they publishing stuff on networks like LinkedIn? Can we find out what they’re interested in and what they’re engaged in? How are they approaching their jobs? What’s important to them? What’s on their radar? We can also start to look at like the sort of micro and macro challenges in a much faster and more efficient fashion.
So we can say, look, and I’ll give you a tangible example of this which we’ve done recently. I’m looking at like, you know, a, I don’t know, a sort of, let’s say a CMO who might be my my key decision maker or a champion for me, right? I’m like, okay, in Australia, what’s on the CMO agenda? What’s on the CMO agenda in Sydney specifically? What’s on the CMO agenda in New South Wales specifically? What’s on my CMO’s contact agenda because what can I see that they’ve been posting about or engaging with or talking about in their company? Then we can start to combine that with, okay, well, if they’re in—and we’re talking about this next week—selling to government. If they deal with government, what’s on the government’s agenda? How can I marry that information together and start to understand the objectives and pressures and sort of, you know, general day-to-day life of this person that I’m trying to sell to?
Then from there, we can start to pull all that together with the other people in the buying group, right? So we can start to build a picture of this group of people and what’s, you know, what their concerns are. Has there been a bunch of firings there in in their industry? Have they been going through a big reorg? Are they maybe concerned about the fact that they might have two or three peers now, they might be reapplying for their own job?
Like all this stuff is really important because that is the stuff that is happening, you know, behind the scenes of the deal that you’re trying to get across the line. That’s happening behind the scenes and in the minds of these people that we’re trying to talk to. And the reason it’s important to know all that is because, you know, what you’re trying to sell them is not going to be top of mind for very long. It might be top of mind for a couple of weeks or when you’re in a meeting with them, but they’re going to go back to dealing with all that other stuff straight away. So the more you can understand about that, the better a conversation you can start to have and the more you can build your relationship around giving them the things that they need to just get the stuff done that they need to do with you and then get on with their day-to-day job at their life.
So the reason I want to call this out is because the, you know, the sort of underlying empathetic approach to building this relationship is directly underpinned by by group intelligence, which is what we build. That’s often not spoken about very much because we love to talk about acronyms and buzzwords and, you know, processes and diagrams and all that other shit in in B2B, and we kind of forget that there’s people that slot into all of those things. And in order to be a successful salesperson—not teaching you how to suck eggs—successful B2B salespeople, you need to be a people person.
So look, that’s that’s how we approach it. It’s like how you see the people in the deal. You don’t just see the company and you don’t just see the roles and you don’t just see the dollar size. Like that’s that’s how you approach it, and that helps you go beyond just having a transactional relationship with the people that you’re trying to sell to and helps you have a real consultative enabling relationship in a positive way that lets them get the jobs done that they need to do without you having to constantly badger them about what’s happening.
Look, I don’t want to belabor this too much, but those are the key things that buy group intelligence helps you to generate, right? It’s like you’re supporting your buying group to reach a consensus, you are enabling them to do the job without you constantly needing to interject and do stuff on their behalf, you are educating them in a way that they want in the forums that they need about what you can do and how you can do it. And that is how you build a much more trust-based approach to building these relationships and supporting these deals and obviously down the track like accelerating your pipeline and selling on, you know, closing bigger deals and all that good stuff.
But look, like that’s that’s really the key thing that is that is how we start everything. That is how I think we can address all of these challenges that I just raised. That’s where I think in the retail industry they are swinging and missing over and over again because they’re all just looking at the numbers and thinking about themselves and they’re not thinking about us as consumers.
Look, like I think I’m just going to end on that hopefully quite positive note in that if you want to have a chat about how to do any of this stuff and how we approach this and how to turn that into tangible work, like obviously I could talk about that forever, but I’m always more than happy to have a conversation if you just want a sympathetic ear to, you know, or an external pair of ears to chat to. That’s how you can approach it. That approach to buyer group intelligence—and I’ll expand on that a bit when I post this on the website—is the way to start building more trust and more empathy with your buying group, and that is how you can understand the intention and the motivation behind the decisions and the feedback and everything that’s happening in your B2B sales conversations.
So on that note, good luck bargain hunting if you are doing so in this horrifying event in the retail year. I hope you found that interesting. That is it from me for this week. I’ll be back next week speaking to Jen again about selling into government and the similarities between B2B. Hope to see you there. Ta-ta for now.