 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to our Lunchtime Webinar Express series. Today we'll be hearing from successful entrepreneur and sales negotiator Mike Lander. For those of you who subscribe to the drum, Mike is a regular with his monthly column and is also founder and CEO of sales consultancy Viscara. So before we get started with Mike's presentation, let's very quickly go over the format for today's session and how you can participate in a live Q&A. We'll be hearing from Mike for around 30-35 minutes. We'll then move into a 10-15 minute Q&A session to answer some of your questions. For those of you registered for the webinar and viewing on the GoToWebinar platform, you'll be able to post your questions for the Q&A at any time during the session by clicking on the question mark you'll see on your screen. If you are watching on a laptop, you'll find the question mark on the right-hand side of your screen or on the top or bottom if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. 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You'll find the entire back catalogue of our Express series in there too, sessions covering a broad range of marketing skills and insight, all free to access and available whenever you want. If you're a university student attending today's webinar, then you may want to sign up to the CIM Marketing Club. All you need to do is hover your camera over the QR code and that will take you straight through to the sign up page. Alternatively, you can hop onto our website and find it within the qualifications drop down menu. It'll keep you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry, so it really is worth taking a look and signing up. So, I would now like to introduce our guest speaker, Mike Lander. If you want to turn your webcam on, Mike, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours. Thanks, Bill. So, I think I have control of the slides, correct? Let's just check. I do. So, welcome, everybody. Great to see you all online. And, yeah, we're going to spend 30 minutes, 35 minutes going through some principles about basically sales negotiation. So, a bit about me, very briefly. And then a quick thing about learning. How can you maximize the learning out of this session? The myth-busting. There are some common myths in negotiation. I'll talk through those and what the myths are. And then talk you through a simple step-by-step guide to negotiate anything, get a better outcome every single time, and then talk about tactics, mistakes, and how to avoid them. Most importantly here, it's, as marketers, you play a critical role with sales when they come to negotiating deals. And I'll cover what that means specifically in a couple of my slides a bit later on. There'll also be a poll later on as well, so which at least will run. So, first of all, about me. So, corporate citizen until 36 spent a long time in big corporates like KPMG and Barclays and a number of other organizations as well. And then I went out and I raised some money. So, I raised £6.5 million of debt. I built a consultancy to around £20 million of revenue. I had 120 people working for me at one point and £4 million of EBITDA. So, I kind of crossed that bridge of being someone who's worked in the big corporate world and learned the great things that corporate teachers in the entrepreneurial world to be more perhaps fleet of foot and then also in the procurement world as well, which I'll come onto in a second. If any of you meet me in person over a coffee, I'll also talk about how and why I built a special needs school and built that up to a large scale as well and then sold it. Ex-procurement director. So, for those of you that know private equity banked companies, big private equity funds that invest in companies, I was an ex-procurement director working for those companies and our job was basically to act as buyers, work with suppliers to drive value, innovation, quality within their supply chain and obviously deliver improved EBITDA net profits. I've also founded a procurement consultancy and I was also a partner in one of the UK's biggest procurement consultancies, working with big brands, again acting as a buyer. Now, I'm the chairman of an award-winning marketing agency called Resignal, we're an organic SEO agency and also an advisor and practitioner on all things negotiation and procurement. I've basically gone from being on the buy side and I now work on the sell side predominantly, helping sellers understand how procurement work, how to negotiate better deals and how to improve RFP win rates. So a bit of learning theory or as I phrased it, how to make sure this isn't an hour of your life, you simply never get back, or actually 45 minutes of your life you'll never get back. Because you must attend a lot of these seminars. So first of all, a bit of a rhetorical question, who is this? So Phil, if anyone puts it in the chat bar, great, but I suspect it will be not many people know who this person is. The answer is it's Herman Ebbinghaus, 1850 to 1909. So you're probably wondering why on earth am I talking about someone that existed and lived well over a century ago? Well, there's something very simple about learning theory. They looked at, or he looked at, information retention. So you're on one of these webinars. You are obviously on many of these webinars as part of your career and part of your education. After them, what he learned was within actually four to five days after training, almost 80% of that learning is lost. And that's a crime for all sorts of reasons, not in the criminal sense, but in the missed opportunity sense. How do we improve that? Well, what he learned was if you review quickly after each session, what happens is your attention goes up. So to make this the most valuable webinar that you've been on for a number of weeks, what I'd like you to do is this. As soon as you can after this session, write down your thoughts and what you've learned. Five minutes over a tea, coffee, water, write down what you've learned and what your thoughts were. Then take just one thing and apply it in the next three days to five days. And then put a reminder in your calendar. Here's the critical bit. Five days time, go back to your notes, then take another action within the next three to five days. I was talking to Phil earlier on and Lisa, the slides are full of content for a reason. Presentation skills trainers would say too much content, just use one or two pictures per slide. What I want is when you get the PDF after the event, you can refer to it, you can learn from it, you can reflect on it, you can apply it. So this needs to be an action-based learning set of content. So the slides are quite, but not dense, but they're content rich. And that learning model helps you get the most out of the session. Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I may remember, involve me and I definitely learn. One of my favorite quotes from Benjamin Franklin. So myth busting, three common myths. Negotiations a mystical art which only the few can master. It just isn't true. Anyone can negotiate anything better with the right tools, mindset and support. Number two, marketing's got nothing to do with sales negotiations, not sales, sales negotiations. Again, simply not true. Part of the negotiation is about explaining the value to the customer, the ROI and the uniqueness of the solution. That to me, I'm also a charter marketer, that to me is at the heart of marketing's role, is articulating that value. Myth number three, 90% of people are win-win negotiators. Often have you heard people say I'm a win-win negotiator. The reality is most deals are about claiming value, not creating more value. In negotiation terms, it's called carving up the pie. What you want to do is make the pie bigger. It's quite rare that you can do that. So some foundations. So what is a negotiation? Let's start with some real basics. So this I got from various sources on the web. A series of interventions, i.e. it's not just a face-to-face discussion. Between two or more parties, multi-party negotiations, very complex. You're trying to reach an agreement that satisfies the interests of all parties. We'll come back to interest later on. Hopefully based on some objective criteria. If you can agree some objective criteria about what a great deal looks like before you start, you can always refer back to that after things get tricky. Because you've got some objective criteria, you've both agreed to. So what's an example of when it can go really badly wrong? So this is a story about the Boston Red Sox. I'm not a big baseball fan, but it's a very interesting illustration of what can happen. Anyone that's out there that's got a connection back to the States or is fascinated will probably know this guy called John Lester, who played for the Red Sox. Possibly the most important negotiation of that year, certainly for die-hard Boston Red Sox fans. What happened was the Red Sox negotiation team completely bought their opening in the renegotiation. They threw out a random, low-ball, uncompetitive offer. Now, $70 million over four years. Hardly what we would normally call low-ball, but see what happens later. The Sox had misread Lester. This is on the web. This is not mine. It's on the web. You can research it. What happened was it ultimately drove Lester into the arms of the Chicago Cubs for a six-year, $155 million deal, double the size, and 50% longer on the contract. Asked 11 months later, after his Cubs deal was done, would Lester have accepted an offer of five years and $120 million? Remember, they offered $70 million in four years. The winning deal was six years and $155 million. Would he have accepted five years and $120 million? Lester said, probably. Misreading Lester cost the Red Sox their star player. So what's the lesson here? Preparation. Understanding your counterparty's interests. They're battener. What's battener? Best alternative to a negotiated agreement. You always need a battener. Market values. They're all critical if you're going to succeed in negotiations. So they hadn't done their preparation. They hadn't understood Lester's real interests. They didn't understand the market unless they had a battener. So transactional versus strategic negotiations, holding on time, 13 minutes past one. So not too bad. A couple of examples. So let's make the example really simple. Really, really basic and simple. A transactional example. So you see a genie's lamp in a bazaar. The vendor wants 50 pound for it. You like it, but you're outraged by the price. You offer 30 pound. The vendor's shocked and says it's worth at least 45. You walk away. They chase you. You settle on 43. Clearly you don't need a framework for this. It's a very straightforward barter in a transactional negotiation. We could talk a lot about where you start anchoring, where you end, and counter anchoring. But that's probably for a more detailed session. A more strategic example. You've picked for a big deal. You've been told you're shortlisted. It's a 300,000 per annum deal. You've then been told to negotiate with procurement. Remember, I'm an ex-procurement director. I'm an ex-buyer at scale. You've looked at the buyer. They've got 20 years of procurement experience. All procurement people I know are trained negotiators. They're trained in theory. They're trained in practice. They have feedback sessions, and they do role plays. They're experienced negotiators. You absolutely need a framework and templates to negotiate that. You see the massive difference. The stakes are so much higher, not just financially. I've been mistaken negotiations. You know, I talked before about interests. Well, the counter is demands. So see if you recognize any of this. Positions, the demands people make. I need 100,000 pounds for this, or the deals off. You know, the maximum contract term we give you is six months. It's a red line. Interests is a really important simple point, but very powerful. And this I got from William Yuri's book on getting to yes. He's a very, very clever capable negotiator from Harvard. Interests are the motivations behind people's demands. We'll say that again. The motivations behind the demand. Why they want something. Their concerns, their expectations, the things they hold dear. So your task in any negotiation is find out why they want something. Don't just accept the demand. Explore, ask probing questions in a professional way. Why is that so important to you? What is it about that that's so important? Are there any options? Finding out their interests and the motivations are absolutely key to a successful negotiation. So how do you negotiate anything better every single time? Well, you prepare. How do you prepare? So I created this thing called the negotiating wheel. It starts like this and we'll run through it quickly and then I'll explain a bit more detail. Step one, what's the context? What are the goals? Step two, what negotiation process are you going to use and what are the time scales? Step three, now prepare for your negotiation using templates. Step four, now you can engage with the account party and learn and go around the loop. Just look at this. So the research says over 80% of the value, 80% of the value is created in basically your preparation. Only 20% is at the table. So you'll create more value using a process, tools, and learning from the skills of expert negotiators. Let me just quickly unpack what's in here a little bit because I think we've got some time. Yeah, we have. What's the context and define your goals? What's the background to this deal? Where did it start? What are your objectives? You've got to try and guess at their objectives. If they've stated them great, if they haven't, you've got to try and work it out. You know I mentioned BATNER before, best alternative to negotiated agreement. You need to work out what your BATNER is. You need to think about what their BATNER is. I was on a call this morning with a client about the negotiation and one of the key questions I said to them was, if you don't reach an agreement, what are you going to do and what might they do? I remember as a seller, your best BATNER is often a strong sales pipeline. As a buyer, an ex-buyer, I will have three suppliers I'm negotiating with. You might be my preferred supplier. I'll have two others waiting in the wings. I have a BATNER. So work out the background, the goals, and the BATNERS. A lot of people miss this bit. I'm glad on the process on the time scales. I believe in the act of writing something down helps you think it through. If you write down the stages in the negotiation you're going to go through and roughly what the time scales are, send it to your counterparty, ask them if they agree. Get them to add their thoughts, change the time scales. When they put their fingerprints on that timeline, if you start to drift away from that timeline, you can go back to them and say, I think we agreed these are the kind of time scales. Is something changed? What's changed? In negotiations, something is always, always changing. And then preparing your deal negotiation itself. So the template that goes with this, again, anyone that wants any more detail can follow up afterwards. But I built a negotiation strategy that I teach as part of my training and coaching programs. You basically want to write down your negotiation variables. So in this, you write down your variables. What do I mean? Price is a variable, contract term is a variable, notice period is a variable, intellectual property is a variable. Write down your variables and then do one simple thing. What's your ideal outcome that you'd like? And then what's your least acceptable outcome? You've now got two limits within which you can negotiate. The problem is most people focus on price and it's a bit of a race to the bottom. In the negotiation, start to trade things. For a better price, you want a longer contract. You want better termination rights. You want to hold on to the IP. There's all sorts of things that you can negotiate around. And I see it as a bit like if you're an audio engineer and you're mixing a record. As you turn one dial up, you probably turn another dial down. And you're trying to do that all the time in your negotiation when you're preparing. And then obviously engage. Use your framework. Think about your goals. Start negotiating. Learn more. Go back to your preparation. Reprepare, carry on. As the negotiations get bigger, more strategic, higher value, take someone with you. It doesn't matter how senior they are or how junior they are. The key thing you want is high attention to detail. Take someone with you who can write notes, keep a track of what's going on. And that way you won't lose track of what people have said and what was implied. So value-based selling and again the critical role of marketing. There are a couple of slides on this. Some foundation principles about value-based selling. You'll hear lots of talk about value-based selling. Broadly it's about you research your prospects, who are their competitors, and the industry trends thoroughly who are your competitors. Client discovery call. You have a discovery call. Understand their context. Ask smart questions. And then you'll outline your solution. The key thing here as marketers is when sales start to position your offer to the client, and bear in mind you've researched your competitors so you know what else your client's looking at, you've got to focus on your key differentiators. What truly makes you stand out? That has a massive impact during the negotiation. If they value those differentiators. Then obviously it's about managing the buyer's risks and concerns, but also about building the business case, the return and investment model. As marketers, part of your role, I believe, is to work with sales to build that business case, to build the templates, to do the pencil sell as I was taught many, many years ago, so that you can see some kind of directional ROI. If you spend £50,000 with us on our solution, we see clients typically get a return of 7 to 1. £350,000 for a £50,000 investment. Here's how it happens. So building that business case and the ROI model is critical. And I believe that's at the heart of your role. Differentiators, building the business case and ROI model with sales. And then obviously running proof of concepts, POCs. To prove the business case, so you do an experiment, you prove the business case. Check the benefits match what's in the business case. And then close and negotiate. So price versus value-based negotiations. There's a power balance. I think we're doing okay for time. So on a spectrum where the buyer has more power or the seller has more power. If the problem solution fit is very simple, it's not complex. The benefits and stakes are low. The buyer is relatively low in the organizational hierarchy and the buyer perceives the offer as a commodity and it's packaged as a simple product and it's easy to get a comparable price. You can see the traits here. This is like commoditized product-based selling. Then obviously the buyer has got more power because it's being treated as a true commodity because you can compare it in the market. You can find an alternative really simply because it's a simple problem to solve. The seller's got much more power in the negotiation if the problem solution fit is highly complex because they can't compare because it's a difficult problem to solve where the benefits and the stakes are very high. If you're involved with senior executives, you know, C-suite, the CEO, the CMO, again very high stakes, senior sponsors, complex problems, very difficult to actually go out and just find another commodity supplier that can deliver that. If the buyer perceives the offer as truly differentiated, truly bespoke, very high value add, and co-designed with them, the seller's got significant power. If you've ever worked with some of the very big consultancy firms, you'll see they're extremely capable of doing this. I worked with McKinsey and PwC and KPMG, EMY, all sorts of organizations. Their partners are very, very capable at operating at C-suite and ensuring that they're not just going to get price-compared because it's a highly complex, value-based negotiation. So tactics, mistakes, and success factors. I think we're heading towards a poll. She's got a quick poll. I'll say what it is first and then Lisa's going to run the poll. Which of these factors, typically, have the biggest impact, do you think, on successful business-to-business sales negotiations? Psychology at the table, active listening, creative problem solving, rigorous preparation, rapid decision-making, or hardball positions set out at the start? So pick one of them. Lisa, could you please run the poll? So it'll take about a minute or so to run the poll. I hope for the votes are starting to come in. How are we doing on the poll, Lisa? We're still collecting some of the responses. We're closing, hopefully, 10, 15 seconds. Perfect. So again, if you've got your last vote, if you put your sandwich down, or your tea, or coffee, or water, and just hit one of the voting buttons, that would be great. There's probably a whirring wheel. There we are. So the good thing is, hopefully, in my materials, rigorous preparation, absolutely. It has the biggest impact, absolutely active listening, creative problem-solving, really good. So that's whereby we're going to make the pie bigger for everyone, because we're going to solve complex problems and add more value to our clients and position ourselves as highly differentiated. Brilliant. To be honest, that's a really, really encouraging poll. I was expecting slightly more of a skew towards the psychology. So great. Psychology is important, of course, but the dominant factors are rigorous preparation and active listening. Thank you. At least I think we can close the poll. Back to the slides. Okay. So I'm running about five minutes filled all together, so we'll run three minutes slightly over the half past for questions. Just check here. Yes, there we are. Most common negotiating mistakes. Let's just run through a couple of these. So I'll bring the list up. Personality is getting in the way, i.e. it becomes personal. It shouldn't be. Take emotions out of the negotiation. It's a very common mistake. Preparation we've talked about. Believing you have to make a decision in the room. Clearly you don't. Don't get trapped into it's a time-expiring deal if you walk out of the room the deal's off. It's not true. It's just a tactic to get you to agree to something. You can read the others at your leisure when the slides come round. And again, same with the observations around successful negotiations. But asking questions, testing your baton, make the first offer. It's called anchoring. Again, you can do some research on that. So here are some examples of aggressive negotiation tactics. These all exist by the way. These aren't made up. Clients talk to me about these virtually every day. So the table thumper. It's outrageous. It's nothing like what we agreed. The use of emotion and anger to overwhelm you. They want you to doubt your own memory and cave in. It's still used, thankfully, not very often. It's an aggressive negotiation tactic. Hello, baller. Your services just aren't worth anywhere near 50,000 euros. You don't understand your market. The most we're going to pay you is 30,000 euros. Take it or leave it. So again, this is called counter-anchoring. And again, we can follow up about that afterwards. But again, it's a very, very classic tactic. We close our supply shortlist at 9.30 a.m. at a sharpening pencils if you want to be in with a chance. Deadlines can force you to make irrational bad choices. I'm old enough to remember Colombo as a series on TV. I call this the last-minute chipper or the Colombo negotiator. And it's the... There's just one more thing before you leave. The one more thing is normally the most important thing. You think you're at the finishing line. They've got something big they want to talk to you about. So, strategies and tactics. It's a massive topic. I write for the drum, which I love. Many of you all know the drum. So, look up, there's a link there. But yeah, if you look at Mike Lander and the drum, I write something called Ask the Negotiator as a regular column, which I'm doing again next week, I think. So, my conclusions. If you've enjoyed this and you've got value out of it and the poll looks like you certainly learned at least two things. You can sign up to my Insight series. This is not a newsletter. No one needs any more newsletters. It's an Insights and Tactics email series. I share things like how to negotiate better deals, tools and templates, how you unstick tricky sales situations, ways to improve your sales process, KPI dashboards, and how to win more RFPs. But lots of stuff on negotiation tactics and how to improve them. I also become an Insights, given I'm an ex-buyer. So, I think some key messages at the end. Marketing play a critical role in sales negotiation. Hopefully, I've demonstrated that to you in a number of ways. Win-win negotiations is the norm, I believe is a common myth. And anyone, I mean anyone, anyone on this call can 10x their negotiations if you just prepare well, use that negotiation wheel. Great preparation requires a step-by-step guide. I've got a book called The Higgle Book, which if you go online there's a Higgle framework that I developed with templates, which is all about preparation. And follow that negotiation wheel. And certainly lack of preparation and understanding interests can have a catastrophic results as you saw from the John Lester example. By the way, there were more than three. Clearly, there were five key messages of polishes. And that's it. Hopefully, that's been valuable. Phil, back over to you. Should I turn my webcam off? And then you can host the questions, Phil. Okay, so thanks very much, Mike. I can clearly see why marketing can perform such an important role in sales negotiations. There's just complete bedfellows. So thanks again for the presentation, Mike. So we're now going to have a short Q&A session. We've already got some questions to get us on the way, which we'll get to in a second, but please do continue to post your questions from Mike. I select the question mark icon and we'll try to get through as many as we can in the next 10 to 15 minutes. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mike. And for those of you who are watching via Facebook or YouTube today, if you want to take part in future Q&As for our Webinar Express sessions, we need to register for the Webinars to the CIM Events page on our social posts and join via the GoToWebinar app. Okay. Mike, which questions would you personally have loved to be asked by salespeople for this type of negotiation? Hello. What's important to me? Really simple. I wouldn't want to start with that as the first question, clearly, but quite early on in our discussions, just can you talk to me about what's really important, Mike? What's important to you right now, given where you are in your financial year for this type of negotiation? And I may have said savings, really important. I think that's the solution. And most importantly, you've got to be a high-quality, reliable supplier. And already, if I'd have said that to my counterpart who's selling, they're better informed about where to position the negotiation. Okay, that's great. I think this next question probably resonates with a lot of marketers. I'd love to take a more active role in our sales negotiations messaging, marketing staff for our sector. It's impossible to keep up any tips. Great question. Very good question. I've been in that role. So yeah, my tip would be you want to find, so first of all, in 30 salespeople, there'll probably be at least three to five salespeople who are much more open to this kind of discussion with marketing. So find out who the three to five are, first of all, that are interested in you joining in with them to support their sales negotiation. Secondly, I would then focus on where are the bigger deals, the more complex deals. Because the more tactical deals they're probably sorted. Focus on something that's a bit more difficult, bit more high value, bit more complex. Either problem they're trying to solve for their client. And then thirdly, what I'd do is I'd be writing that ROI business case, differentiators, thought leadership paper. So back in the day we'd call them white papers 20 years ago. Now I would call them clearly thought leadership papers. Build your thought leadership papers, half a dozen pages, a great role for marketing. Work with sales on that thought leadership paper because they can use that as an asset not just during negotiations, but during their early discovery calls as well. And their skill here is it's not a sales document as such. It's a thought leadership document to educate potential buyers and to demonstrate the ROI of the kinds of solutions that they should be looking for. So I'd start with find a few two or three sales people a few complex deals and work with them on that ROI differentiator thought leadership paper. Does that help? Great. I think that's probably the answer to this next question that you may have something else to add. So is how can marketing ensure they're involved with a sales team who believe negotiations are 100% their remit? So how do you sort of make that breakthrough? Yeah, good question. I first of all wouldn't challenge them. I wouldn't say no, no, no, we should be involved at all. I'd say absolutely it's 100% your accountability. I understand what I was trying to do was I'm hoping to help our association in support by looking at things like differentiators and looking at the ROI model and helping you think about some of the other variables that you might have outside of just like kind of price and where we can add more value as an organization. And the initial reaction will be I don't need to know that. I've seen it all before. The good thing is with marketing is you see across the entire business a sales person sees their deals. So you can say, well, look, actually I've worked across many aspects of our business and I've talked to lots of sales people about opportunities. What I'm finding is these are the kind of common themes that are coming up. I wonder if any of these are coming up for you as well. Are these some of the questions you're being asked? Because I can help answer them. So I'd be positioning it around you have a wide view of the organization. You talk to many sales people. You picked out the key themes and you think that some of these ideas in this thought leadership paper may well be a benefit when they're negotiating their next deal. Okay, thanks. What's the most important thing to know or do when entering a negotiation wherein you have very little control or power? So the first thing I'd say that I would do is I'd go back further up the chain and work out why you don't have much power. But let's assume for a minute that actually you're in a relatively commoditized market. Whereby it's relatively easy for you to or rather for the customer to kind of benchmark and therefore you're in a pretty tough position. The first thing to do is prepare your mind. It will be a tough negotiation. It will be aggressive. So the key thing is you've absolutely got to know your market data. You cannot walk into that negotiation not knowing who your competitors, what their pricing is, what their incentive plans are, what their special offers are, you've got to prepare and research really well. Because if you don't you'll just be used as for example you'll be used as a price lever for them to go to the people they want to work with to reduce the price they're going to buy at. What do I mean by that? If you've got no differentiation at all in your offer and you're desperate for the deal they'll beat you up on price. Say the price was 100 and they get you to a price of 75. If the market price bottom is 90 they've now got a bid at 75. You they'll take that bid to someone else. They won't tell who obviously made the bid and they'll say to the one that they want I can get this in the marketplace at 75. So like for like basis take it or leave it the one they want to do the deal with may well go down to 80. So they've just got an extra 10 points off the price. So you'll be used as a price negotiating lever not as a real contender. So you've got to prepare really really well. Is that okay for? Yeah indeed. Preparation again is key. Do you have any preparation? Yeah. Do you have any simple tips for dealing with the table some part? Yes I do. Don't react. So first of all there'll be a blush response in all human beings. We have this flushing effect when we get frightened it's a natural physical response. So what you do is there's a bang on the table so you get shocked. Just take a breath. So breathe in through your nose for three seconds and breathe out through your mouth for three seconds just to calm yourself down and then go back to the rational. So there's a model called pack which is a parent adult child model in psychology and what that says is basically you don't want to be in the parent child scolding the child. You want to be in an adult-adult professional relationship and adults talk to adults about facts and situations and objectives. So when the reaction happens stop breathe don't talk and then go back to can we just go back to the facts that we talked about before can we just go back to what we've agreed already and then can I understand what your reaction is based around. If they do it again what seems to be happening here you're looking for an emotional reaction from me but we're negotiating a deal aren't we? So you take if you see something happening in the room my advice is talk into what's happening call out an aggressive negotiation tactic for what it is most people will back down at that point does that help? Yeah sounds great advice Mike you mentioned anchoring during your presentation can you explain a bit more about how you said that? Yeah yeah so price anchoring is a very well researched topic lots of stuff on the Harvard site so Harvard program on negotiation if you look that up and price anchoring is a great reference source as hopefully I am as well but price anchoring basically is all the research that was done and they've got lots of research to think on their site was often certainly in a UK culture British culture we often feel embarrassed about setting a price that we think or we feel is too high and the research came back and said actively what you want to do is you should set the price you should anchor the price at the highest level you can within the realms of market acceptance it's called the zone of agreement so do your research understand where the market pricing is you set the price you anchor the price at the highest level in the market and what will happen is people negotiate typically about 10% around the anchor so for example if the market maximum price is 100 and you came in at 60 because you were slightly embarrassed about saying 100 then you'll end up at 54 if you set the price at 100 long as you're credible and you're calm and you're controlled and you're well prepared the likelihood is you'll end up at 90 with a trade for something else for that 10% discount but look it up online with lots of research just got time for a couple more before we have to close so the first thing is once the sale is done is marketing's role completed? so in theory yes in practice I believe no because the feed button loop I believe is essential so what should be happening is when the deals are done and the sales are closed then you ought to be talking to your sales colleague to say how could we improve what could we improve two simple questions what went well with the negotiation regarding what I gave you was I helpful so we'll do more of that and then what could we improve so what didn't go so well but I could change next time we do a negotiation the other thing I'd say Philly is very importantly that thought leadership paper you've written that should be being refined every time you close a deal and you learn you should be feeding it into your materials I run these negotiation training programs I've now got 17 modules that's probably now got in it I don't know 200 250 slides because every time I run the program I learn and I incorporate new materials the same should happen with your thought leadership papers keep refining and keep on updating excellent okay and finally Mike what would be your top tip for marketing professionals regarding negotiating I would say there's two things as marketing professionals you'll be negotiating your budgets every year or every quarter depending on your cycle use the same principles use the same principles when negotiating your budget when told or being asked to chop 30% do your homework be prepared go back with a well if we did that it looks like the sales uplift we're going to get the revenue generation will be impacted by another like 20% so maybe if we spent a bit more over here then we'd get more uplift but not quite as much as we were hoping for so you're negotiating so prepare well and the second thing is I'd get close to your sales colleagues because they're close to the market and what we as marketers want is to be close to our customers and sales people are very close to prospects and customers I hope it's been really helpful, thank you for the questions thank you very much Mike that's brilliant so we're now going to have a sorry that's my way of it so unfortunately that's all we've got time for for today's Q&A we'd like to say thank you to Mike for his fantastic presentation and to the CIM Great London Group that you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile we'll be sending out a short survey in the next few hours and we'd love to hear your feedback it will only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous so please do let us know your thoughts and what you would like to see from our Webinar Express series in the future we'll be back with our next Webinar Express on Tuesday the 11th of October and I'll use your time at 1pm with our guest speaker Edna Poampal we'll be sharing insights on the award winning getting under the skin behavioral change campaign you'll find further details listed on the events page of our website where you'll also be able to register for the session and this is the best way if you want to get involved in the Q&As and submit questions so if you've been watching us via Facebook or on YouTube remember to register for the session and then watch us via the GoToWebinar platform by clicking on the giant link in your reminder email so that just leads me to say a final thank you to everyone for joining us today thank you once again Mike for our fabulous presentation and some great answers to the questions we do hope that you've enjoyed the Webinar take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon