Negotiating with Backbone

"My sales team is getting crushed when negotiating new deals..."

Sales leaders frequently call us to say, "enough is enough." In negotiation after negotiation, they are being beaten up repeatedly by procurement and turning over seemingly endless price concessions; and now they want – and are ready for – a big change. These world-class organizations recognize that defending even 1% in price in a $5M deal drops $50K in margin to the bottom line.  Negotiating with Backbone is designed to help you combat the new procurement playbook and develop your own plays to take back the field.

Everyone in the organization – from pricing to marketing to sales leadership – will benefit from learning how they play a role in protecting the company’s value and getting a fair price based on value.

Backbone strategies include:

• Decoding the buyer’s position and tactics
• Qualifying deals to determine when to respond to an RFP
• Making better decisions for resource allocation
• Decreasing the dependency on executive bail outs to “save the deal”
• Mapping the buying center to better manage procurement gatekeepers
• Knowing your position at the bargaining table and how your strengths can be leveraged to close profitable business

Negotiating with Backbone is a culture-changing, experiential initiative to drive better understanding, management, and defense of value in tough negotiations.  Designed to give a power-boost to mainstream sales processes, Backbone gives salespeople and leaders the knowledge and tools to effectively identify buyer behaviors and use battle-tested tactics to negotiate with customers to realize higher revenue and margins.

What do you say when a customer asks for a discount?  If your answer is anything other than, “No problem,” you are likely missing an essential tool in your sales toolkit, namely, Give-Gets^SM. These are product or service trade-offs that your sales team can add or subtract to meet the customer’s budget or bluff.  So, when a customer asks for a discount, your response should be, “No problem. Let me show you what options are available at different price points.” Poker Players will object loudly, while Price Buyers will say “Thanks.”  Therein lies your negotiating power. 

For more on curbing your discounting, check out: 

"But is the impact of Negotiating with Backbone measurable?"

A perfectly reasonable concern. A recent case study helps to provide some context for what Negotiating with Backbone meant to an EVP at a global services company as well as the resulting meteoric 44 percent revenue increase he experienced after implementing it.

"When's the best time to engage our customers?" 

Time and time again we hear from sales leaders who are reactive rather than proactive. Selling with Backbone is an initiative specifically designed to help Sellers engage both early in the customer’s decision process, when Buyers are most interested in having a value conversation, and higher in the organization, where the real decisions are made.

Selling with Backbone improves business outcomes by focusing on the customer and:

• Engaging early to uncover unmet needs
• Empowering sales to have high-impact value conversations 
• Transforming your sales team from product sellers to business advisors
• Making your internal champion a hero by measuring and communicating your realized value to the c-suite.

Check out our fact sheet on Selling with Backbone:

"Coaches that weren't just about achieving results, but about about sustaining results"

Our coaching programs extend beyond one-on-one and include:

• Developing a Coaching Organization
• Executive Coaching
• The Coaching Refresher [Master Class]