Symptoms of a Bad Seller

Qualifying out is what sellers do when it turns out that the potential clients in the pipeline aren’t likely to become actual clients.

But qualifying out is also what buyers do when they decide they don’t want to do business with a seller.

There are a number of stages at which a buyer will qualify out a seller, and one of those stages is going to be the contract.

What factors are likely to cause a buyer to qualify the seller out? Here are two major ones.

Firstly: the duration of the contract. The other day a client of mine (the buyer) was presented with a SaaS contract for a commodity service. The seller proposed a contract duration of 5 years, plus a sizeable implementation fee.

5 years! In the old days of outsourcing, 5 years would have been OK because each outsourcing was tailor-made. But in SaaS, where the underlying logic is one-size-fits-all and the incremental cost of taking on an additional customer is really low, it makes no sense. Unless the seller’s product is really unique (and onboarding costs are heavy), the underlying message from the proposed 5 years is: we are going to take you for a ride.

Secondly: the extent to which the seller’s contract addresses the concerns of the buyer. In the same contract, the seller made no mention of how the buyer could access its own data, even though the processing of the buyer’s data was the whole point of the contract.

Yes, all this kind of stuff can be fixed by negotiating the contract to a better state, but that misses a key point: the contract a seller puts forward is a symptom of how the seller thinks about its customers.

Negotiating the contract to a better state will fix the symptom, but it will not fix the underlying cause. And how many buyers are going to sign a contract where the seller demonstrates that it doesn’t take its customers’ concerns seriously?

 17th February 2026