Pro tip for sales hiring managers: give your best and final offer upfront. Here’s why.
When you make an offer, tell candidates directly:
“This is our best number. We’ve benchmarked it against the market and we’re confident it’s competitive. This isn’t a test of your negotiation skills – we just want to be fair and transparent with you.”
Then ask: “Will this work for you?”
If they say yes, follow up immediately:
“Great – when can you sign? We’ll send the DocuSign before we hang up.”
Momentum is everything in a close. Every hour between “yes” and a signature is an hour for a competing offer to land, for cold feet to set in, or for the candidate to feel like the excitement has fizzled. Send it while they’re still on the call.
Why this whole approach works:
It saves everyone time. The back-and-forth negotiation dance can drag on for days. Candidates prepare counter-offers. You loop in finance. Everyone loses a week.
Skip it.
It’s fairer to people who don’t negotiate. Research is clear: people who negotiate hard get paid more than equally qualified people who don’t. That gap often breaks along gender and cultural lines. If your compensation is actually competitive, just say so and mean it.
It signals the kind of company you are. Starting a relationship with “here’s our real answer, not our anchoring position” tells a candidate exactly what kind of culture they’re walking into. Transparency from day one builds trust.
It still lets candidates walk away. This isn’t pressure – it’s information. If the number doesn’t work for them, you both find out faster. No one wastes months in a role that was never going to feel right financially.
The candidate who’s going to thrive in your sales org doesn’t need to prove it by wrangling their own comp package. They need to trust you.
Make the offer you’d want to receive. Then close it.