Holden Advisors Blog

A reverse auction may land you a new client, but if you are the incumbent, it may be better to say no. Here’s why.

Topics: Negotiating with Backbone, Selling with Confidence, Uncovering your Value, procurement

Want to negotiate a winning deal? Learn the four basic buyer types and leverage the Customer Experience Pyramid to give yourself the winning edge.

Topics: Negotiating with Backbone, Pricing with Confidence, Uncovering your Value, customer experience

Each year, customer experience (CX) consultants release studies highlighting how impactful CX can be. The Temkin Group (a CX consultancy now owned by Qualtrics) published a study stating that companies earning $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in CX. In addition, Daniel Newman, CEO of Broadsuite Media Group reported that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. These findings are on the heels of a 2013 global CX study from Oracle finding that 97% of executives believe that delivering a great customer experience is critical to their business advantage and results. 

Topics: Pricing with Confidence, Uncovering your Value, customer experience

When determining product value, it’s important to go beyond cost and demand. Your customers’ perceived value matters too, especially if you want to build lasting business relationships.

Topics: Selling with Confidence, Uncovering your Value, Selling with Backbone, value selling

Spoiler alert: Lowering prices on a high-value product in a competitive market will rarely drive long-term growth. Here’s what to do with your competitive pricing strategy instead. 

Topics: Pricing with Confidence, pricing

In the world of sales, it’s easy to get caught up in the possibilities of an unsolicited RFP. But, if you find yourself dealing with procurement, you might want to save your energy.

Topics: Negotiating with Backbone, Selling with Confidence, Selling with Backbone

One of our top goals in any consulting engagement is uncovering revenue and profit growth opportunities for clients. Generally, we want to answer four key questions:  

Topics: Pricing with Confidence

Holden Advisors has the privilege of working with some of the top global sales organizations which affords us visibility into challenges that leaders in those organizations face on a daily basis. We're frequently asked about these common challenges because they might be applicable to issues encountered by other companies. The following represent the top three themes that we see across our sales performance engagements that Holden Advisors has encountered over the past 10 years.

Topics: Negotiating with Backbone, Selling with Backbone

Not every company has a pricing department. Here we explain why they are incredibly important players in the price, cost, revenue equation. 

Topics: Pricing with Confidence

Big or small, almost all B2B companies have to sell to large, powerful companies because they believe that the "big win" keeps the plant running or resources at capacity. Those negotiations are often tough and focus on price. “Tough” isn't quite the right word – how about brutal? Those big companies, or gorillas, control a lot of revenue, and like it or not, we have to sell to them. As a result of those brutal negotiations, the oftentimes smaller seller will lose money or barely break even. 

Topics: Negotiating with Backbone