Welcome to the April 15, 2009 edition of the book marketing blog carnival.
Marketing and Online Marketing

Tushar presents SEO Checklist for Creating a New Website posted at TUSHARVICKKIE, saying, “The SEO Checklist lists all the important and…

Welcome to the April 13, 2009 edition of business carnival.
Here You can see the best work of that carnival!
Tbarr presents Glossary Of The Most Commonly Used Internet Marketing Terms posted at Online-Biz-Now, saying, “This post will be very help…

1. Phillip’s appalling negotiation skills – what amazed me was that he had no tactics in his toolbox other than to continually drop his price.

Every now and again I go into a sales situation where there is a mismatch between the price of what I’m offering and what the prospect is willing or able to pay. This is typically obvious pretty early on (as it was with Phillip – although his gut should have told him that 60 quid was out of this world for canapes!). A great tactic is to offer the prospect the chance to play. “I really want to work with you on this, would you give me a sense of what you’re prepared to pay / what you’ve paid in the past / how much budget you’ve got for this.” I’ve found people often respond well to this – I’m genuinely interested in what it would take to build a relationship and they like this and am very congruent, soft even, when I take this approach. This then opens up 3 options (i) we can match the service to the price – so “for xxx pounds we could do xyz, how does that sound”… (ii) we can offer a different service – “one of the ways we could meet your budget envelope would be to use a combination of our team and your internal resources. We’ve used this approach with blah blah blah. Would you like me to tell you a bit about how that worked?” (iii) I’m in walk away territory – we’re not actually going to be able to meet the price and we don’t want the work that badly!

If the prospect doesn’t play then there’s a call to be made. This kind of discussion is based on the assumption that we both want a good deal – neither of us wants to gouge the other. The prospect wants a great service for a reasonable price, I want to deliver a great service and make a reasonable profit in line with what I could expect to make for the same service elsewhere. If the prospect thinks that by withholding budget (they can even give a range) they will get a better deal then they are setting up for an adversarial relationship – everyone is out for themselves. This is not the basis for a good relationship and I’d have to really want the business to stay engaged.

2. Yasmina’s project management

There were lots of things wrong with her performance, the quality of food especially. However, what did fascinate me was that typically tasks at this early stage are a complete shambles, the project manager spends lots of time shouting and there are at least 3 prima donnas. It pains me to say that usually the girls team performs much more poorly in this regard than the boys team.

While I thought her personal style was somewhat off-putting, she seemed well organised, gave her team clear instructions, and the task looked well controlled for one of the early stage tasks. (Although strange delegation to the poor girl who had to pitch the menu and obviously knows nothing about food!) Indeed, when Sir Alan asked the team whether she was good they were all positive about her – very unusual to get that kind of feedback and again especially at this early stage.

I think this is borne out by the amount of money they got docked. Clearly the food was average to crap at best but the girls were professional, welcoming, well organised and actually managed the event as they’d been instructed.

Great episode this one – one of my favourites.

I agree that the series does give the impression that business is more about fleecing the customer than about delivering value and building long term relationships, which is a shame.

In his follow-up interview on “You’ve Been Fired”, Rocky came across as a reasonably decent human being, so maybe we’ve not heard the last of him. Sales lesson: don’t be overawed by older or more experienced colleagues if you know in your heart that they are talking b*****ks.