Does Your Company Have a Good Negotiating Position?

One of the things that sometimes worries us about the companies we work with, even the larger ones, is the fill and leak syndrome.

You probably don’t know what we’re talking about by this name, but if we describe it to you, you’ll understand.

Any salesperson knows that to get sales, you have to make proposals. To make proposals, you have to make meetings. To make meetings, you have to make appointments. To make appointments, you have, in most cases, to make phone calls.

This is something that, in most cases, a company and its business cycle cannot escape.

The fill-and-void syndrome is that many companies mistakenly work in this kind of cycle.

When they don’t have sales, they work like crazy to get them, dedicating themselves to this purpose.

When they get the business, they get so involved in their success that they sometimes neglect their commercial activity.

One fine day they wake up and find that they have no business to work on again, and there they go, dedicating themselves to commercial activity once more.

We call this the Fill and Empty cycle.

The issue is that many companies do not understand that they must balance their commercial activity with delivering products or services, even when the commercial teams are partly shared with other areas.

This type of cycle causes companies to become exhausted. Also, there is a feeling that the commercial activity is always so tricky, but it could be much more straightforward in reality.

On the other hand, in phases where the company performs poorly commercially, salespeople tend to facilitate discounts or concessions since they are more “anxious” to get business.

In this way, our negotiating position with our client companies is always quite fragile.

But does it always have to be this way?

Not in our opinion.

To overcome this type of cycle and wean people off its vicissitudes is, in the first place, to make salespeople understand that the practical and divided management of their time has to be one of their main concerns.

It must be divided between the commercial area and the other areas in which they are involved.

Exclusive blocks of time in the week should be dedicated to the usual prospecting and business follow-up tasks, which so often get neglected in the daily hustle and bustle.

If we do not prospect every week, we quickly fall into the trap of having no opportunities to work with, and again we enter the cycle of Leak and Fill.

The other way to combat these situations has to do with social media that allows easier access to decision-makers.

Sites such as Linkedin, allow us to reach our clients via accessory channels without as much pressure and often with much greater effectiveness.

As for using Guerrilla Marketing, it’s one of the other ways to reach companies and get them to open their doors to us without such high prospecting costs.

Think with me, if instead of chasing your client, your client was chasing you, what would your negotiation position be?

Wouldn’t it be more effective?

Of course it would.

This week stop and think for a moment!

Are there not more effective ways to reach our customers?

Originally published at Results Driven.