Holden Advisors Blog

With the media full of reported bullying incidents in politics, schools, on sports teams, and in the work place, why do so many sales professionals put up with these similar tactics demonstrated by procurement? Some bullying experiences are subtle while some are more outrageous than others – downright kamikaze!  Negotiating Backbone is imperative for today's sellers.

How Well Does Your Sales Team Harvest Value?

As the understanding and communication of value matures in a sales organization, the payoff to a company’s profit increases.  This truth is widely accepted, like that fire is hot or rain is wet.  If the fact that value creation and harvesting has profit implications is no surprise to anyone, why do so few sales teams reach a level of value maturity and fewer still are able to maximize it when they do get there?

If a tree falls in woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  After listening to a presentation in which the speaker claimed value didn’t exist until the customer recognized it, I thought about this age old question a bit differently. Let me ask it again, but this time insert one key phrase: If a supplier’s product or service impacts a customer’s business, but a customer doesn’t recognize it, does that value exist?

(Excerpt form Tannis' current featured blog)

We talk a lot about how sales teams can Negotiate with Backbone, and rightly so.  This is a huge opportunity to take action in limiting discounts that companies think they need to give to win business.  Our clients’ sales teams are making significant improvements on margin in negotiating their very next deal after learning the Backbone framework.

Congratulations! You just inked a major deal that you’ve been working on for the past six months. You carefully worked the deal through a complex buying process, beating out your major competitor in the process. Your quota is almost clinched for the quarter. Time to focus on those other prospects that you have shortchanged recently in the hope of making it over the finish line.

We all like to believe we understand the value our products and services will bring to our customers.  We study our products and link the benefits of what our company delivers to our customers and their respective business; believing we can make a positive contribution.  However, why is it the messages we work so hard to develop often fall on deaf ears?  Why does it seem the value message we believe in, comes short of getting passed our immediate contacts?

What if I told you that just by focusing on improving your teams’ price negotiation muscles, you can improve your topline by 2 or 3%, maybe more?  What would this mean to the profitability of your company?  What would this mean for your own compensation?  Here are three simple but powerful backbone-building resolutions that will help your teams work smarter, not harder, in 2016:

The tale of the commodity Christmas tree.