Negotiating with Backbone: Eight Sales Strategies to Defend Your Price and Value

by Reed Holden

Overview

B2B sales professionals: resist mindless discounting, level the playing field against tough procurement organizations, and close the deal on your terms! Negotiating with Backbone, Second Edition definitive guide for every sales pro facing the “procurement buzzsaw” – and it’s just been updated with even more powerful strategies and techniques! Where traditional purchasing managers negotiated, procurement officials seek to dictate, through multiple tactics with a single intent: to gain unprecedented discounts and concessions. Premier pricing strategist and sales consultant Reed K. Holden gives you the powerful new strategies and tactics you need to protect your margins and get the right deal. Holden guides you through recognizing what purchasing negotiators are really up to, keep value at the forefront of negotiations, and avoiding the mindless discounting that wrecks profitability. Holden details eight strategies for all types of pricing negotiations, including approaches for negotiating with price buyers, relationship buyers, value buyers, and poker players, reverse auctions, and much more. In this Second Edition, he offers extensive new coverage of establishing your foundation of value, and developing crucial give-get options, including value-added services. This book will be an invaluable resource for every B2B sales professional, customer-facing professional, and every executive responsible for leading successful sales organizations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780134270036
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	09/21/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	342 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Reed K. Holden, Coach and Founder of Holden Advisors, is a world-class B2B pricing expert who helps clients build go-to-market strategies to drive price leadership, selling backbone, and profitable growth. Dr. Holden specializes in helping sales organizations avoid the procurement buzzsaw SM  by implementing strategies to recognize and counter margin-reducing buying tactics. As a change agent, he works with major corporations throughout the world to manage with in outside-in view of the customer.  He is an enthusiastic and persuasive advocate for demonstrating customer value and price leadership with companies that need to adapt in highly competitive markets. In 2008 he co-authored Pricing with Confidence: Ten Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table, a top selling pricing book for executives.

Table of Contents

• Part 1. The Great Game of Procurement
• 1. Tough Selling---The New Normal
• 2. The Tells of the Game
• 3. The Basics of the Game
• 4. Understand Your Foundation of Value
• Part II. Eight Knock-Em-Dead Scenarios for Winning the Game
• 5. Develop Give-Get
• 6. Negotiating with Price Buyers
• 7. Negotiating with Relationship Buyers
• 8. Negotiating with Value Buyers
• 9. Negotiating with Poker Players
• Part III. It’s a Negotiation, Not a Surrender
• 10. Advanced Gamesmanship
• 11. The Realities of the Game

Editorial Reviews

Defeat the “Procurement Buzzsaw”…and get the margins you deserve

“Negotiating with Backbone is part of our culture. We now truly understand the value of our services and know how to turn the negotiations table to our favor, regardless of the type of buyer we are facing. And the icing on the cake is access to Reed for the most difficult negotiations.”

-Rudy Ploder, President, U.S. Information Solutions, Equifax

“Our customer-facing teams can confidently communicate and demonstrate our value to multiple buyer types. The Backbone strategies and tools drive real change in sales execution because they have a true understanding of value to the customer.”

-Lynn Guinn, Global Strategic Pricing Leader, Food Ingredient & Systems, Cargill

“I have been reading Reed’s works for over two decades now. Negotiating with Backbone, 2^nd edition, comes with more fine-tuned insights – engaging, pragmatic, lucid and devoid of management jargon. It will take your thinking forward, help you craft winning pricing strategies, and arm you with negotiation tactics to better suit today’s highly competitive B2B settings. Procurement teams are getting more trained, competition is becoming incredible fierce, while brand and customer loyalty are plummeting. Emerging as well as developed markets are grappling with longer recession cycles that trigger pricing issues and dominate minds of company’s top management.’

-Vishal Kimar, CEO & Entrepreneur, ACMECAST, New Delhi India

“Procurement relief! Salespeople can unlock the mystery of procurement price pressure and bidding wars for less than the price of a dinner. Negotiating with Backbone is the first negotiation book of its kind that doesn’t teach ‘manipulative tricks’–rather it focuses on winning strategies that turn into orders. Buy it, read it, bank it.”

–Jeffrey Gitomer, author, Little Red Book of Selling

The Second Edition is Even Better

· Prepare for the procurement gauntlet

· Counter procurement’s cutting-edge models and analytics

· Use “Give-Gets” to restore the link between price and value

From the Publisher