January 6, 2009
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Don’t Let A Savvy Buyer Make You Dance ’Til You Drop
Tim Roberts
I hope my younger brother still likes me. By all rights, he shouldn’t. I used to make him dance.
Not like a moonwalk or Virginia Reel, but the kind the bad guys used to force on the good guys in old Westerns. You know, they’d shoot their guns at a good guy’s feet and make him “dance.” They always yelled and laughed and whooped it up.
I thought it was funny when I was a kid and so, with a wee bit of bully edge, I would throw pebbles at my brother’s feet and make him dance. My pals would join me.
Vince, my brother, rarely flinched. He never bailed and I don’t think we ever got to his self-esteem. He seemed to accept the absurdity of it all, although from time to time I could see his body language saying, “Your time will come, chump.”
He was never in a position to negotiate. Outnumbered, outsized and out-rocked, he would yell, “Stop it!” and we would laugh harder and throw faster. Truth be told, I never felt bad because I had experienced the same treatment from my older brother and his buddies. In fact, I was quite the dancer. Sometimes I dealt with it and sometimes I fought back.
Salespeople are forced to dance all the time. They are often outnumbered, outsized and out-trained. The dance is called the buyer-seller dance and perhaps you, too, have a pair of worn-out selling shoes bearing evidence of having been stepped on.
The song of choice for savvy buyers is, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” I’ve seen that written in black Magic Marker on more than one buyer’s forehead. Buyers have negotiating strategies and salespeople have features and benefits. That’s the equivalent of one corner with brass knuckles and the other tossing water balloons.
Selling is getting what you want on your terms and conditions. Negotiating is modifying those terms and conditions. When we used to have Vince dance, he was pulled in unwittingly. It happened fast and he was caught off guard. He would look at us with a face that said, “What? Why me? I thought we were pals and I was a part of the group?” I’ve felt that way a hundred times with buyers.
Salespeople get twirled around the dance floor until they’re rendered dizzy. Dizzy means you’re off balance. Dizzy means no control. Dizzy means you go home early.
I asked Chris Doerr, one of the most well-thought-out (and well-thought-of) salespeople I know, about his own encounters with savvy buyers. He said, “Tim, most salespeople are vulnerable at negotiation time because they haven’t planned for the moment. More often than not, they haven’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together (that’s called ‘qualifying’), then are blindsided when the buyer starts to use what he has been trained for. Very simply, their antennas aren’t up.”
Chris, a top producer for Wisconsin based WS Packaging, went on to reveal a common buyer strategy that often has amateurs high-stepping. It’s when the buyer says, “We’re glad you showed up. Our current suppliers are getting comfortable and I think the management team will see the wisdom of your proposal. But you have to do a little bit better.”
“And there it is,” Chris said. “You have to do a little better.” That’s the trap. That’s the start of the buyer-seller dance. Chris said he knows a buyer who uses that line, “You have to do better” all the time with great success. The buyer told him that fully 80 percent of all salespeople he gives that line to come back with a lower price. Fifty percent will lower the number when asked to do better a second time! The buyer tells Chris when a salesperson comes back twice in a row with, “I can’t go any further,” he knows the seller’s threshold, the seller’s real price position.
Why do buyers want you to feel like there is a chance of winning? Why do they want their current suppliers to feel like there is a chance of losing the relationship? Why do they send your alleged relationship out to bid? Not because they are bad, manipulative or evil. They do it because weak salespeople have been setting them up to do it for so long. Buyers know salespeople are eager just to be invited in to the process. They know salespeople get emotionally involved early and often and, when they get nervous, they give things away.
A primary tactic employed by corporate negotiators is to create a buyer’s market. It gives them leverage. Who can blame them? No one likes wrestling with an 800-pound gorilla. Dancing’s out of the question.
Chris is right when he says, “You shouldn’t have to negotiate, ever. I don’t like dancing all that much and I sure don’t like it with strangers. When I’m pulled to the floor too quickly by a buyer or feel I’m being led with a heavy hand, I sit down. That’s called ‘walk-away power’ and it makes me stand out from the crowd. I’m more noticeable, or at least more intriguing, when I sit alone than I am with a big crowd gaggling to be noticed.”
And my brother, Vince? Therapy is going well, he reports. And he wanted to know if I would join his family for Thanksgiving dinner, next year, maybe.
Trustpointe, Inc.
6666 East 75th Street, Suite 150
Indianapolis, IN 46250
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