Having closed on yet another five figure domain sale, I’m confident with discussing an incoming inquiry strategy, and how to win it.
The “two-spear attack” is an attempt to get a domain, facilitated by the same party by submitting two offers of varied size.
It can most definitely be extended to accommodate additional offers from people that appear to be unrelated, but who are in fact part of the same company or associates thereof.
Here’s how it works.
An incoming inquiry establishes a level of negotiations, and an asking figure is delivered. The other party indicates their interest, usually stating the old cliche of “looking into additional domains,” and unveils their offer.
In this case, the offer was in the high four figure range, below my selling threshold, and I countered with a price in the five figures, indicating my ability to move swiftly with a sale, should an agreement come to fruition.
Within a couple of days, I received another inquiry from another party, about the same domain.
After extensive research, I managed to match the two persons despite their use of generic email addresses. The second inquiry asked for, and received a quote, for which I once again indicated a five figure range.
The following day, inquiry “B” arrived with a low counter-offer, lower than the one placed by inquiry “A”. I responded that this would not be a price to sell at, and asked them if they’d rather have the exchange terminated.
At that point, the “two-spear” attack would work if I went back to offer “A” and accepted it, in fear of losing the deal, but I did not. Instead, I closed inquiry “B”, and waited.
Two days later, inquiry “A” had accepted my counter-offer in the five figures. For a company that does not enter that range in domains acquired in the secondary market – per my research – that alone was quite the achievement.
In domain negotiations, a school of thought professes that “whoever names a number first, loses.”
On occasion, I’ve found this mantra to be correct, but the indication of a price range as opposed to a fixed number can help overcome this requirement.
The case of “two-spear attack” inquiries demonstrates how you can effectively leverage offers that arrive at the same time from the same party, in order to confuse and derail your strategy. Keep in mind, that this approach is often utilized by domain brokers as well, who work “hard” to get the lowest price for their clients.
This strategy would probably make me increase the price as I would assume there is demand for the domain. This is a stupid thing to do.
Unless something like this is done at Sedo where the owner can push a domain to auction and hope that there is going to be a bidding war, that will never happen. But I never push domains to auction so that would fail as well. 🙂
(I always get a time limit exhausted message when I try to submit a comment. Even after 2 or 3 minutes reading the post. I need to refresh the page and then it works.)
Yeah, the captcha timer seems to start ticking right away 😀 But I get a lot of spam otherwise, so it’s not possible not to have it. 😉
Indeed, demand for a domain can be assessed as increased volume in inquiries. But when they occur consecutively, they are part of a plan to utilize the exchange’s momentum and make the seller “grab” the offer: the highest one of the two, which is still below the original asking price. The difference can vary, naturally.
Inversely, a lot of buyers don’t work well with auctions and can back off the moment a domain is sent to auction.
You might also thing that the term is trending somehow.
“Inversely, a lot of buyers don’t work well with auctions and can back off the moment a domain is sent to auction.”
That is when I jump in and grab the domain! 🙂
Just did on Monday.
“think” not “thing”
Acro what kind of domain was that ? just curiosity
and how many domains you own ? can we know ?
Thank you
Andrew – A two word .com. I’ve too many domains, and with this sale one less to worry about. 🙂
Excellent post. I like the term “two-spear attack”. I think this is an important factor to be mindful of. How did you recognize the two generic emails were related? In my opinion domain brokers do not always seek out the lowest price. Especially when their paid via commissions.