Fresh from Florida

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By Stephen Kozicki

Last week, Peter Browne from Gordian Business was presenting in Florida at the Strategic Account Management Association’s 50th Anniversary Conference. Peter was presenting a case study of a successful client who in a mature market grew profit ahead of their 5 year plans.

“SAM has had the biggest impact of any initiative
we have undertaken in the last five years.
The business is almost unrecognisable.”

Case study, The Managing Director

The Strategic Account management Association (SAMA) have published the case study in their latest ‘Velocity’ magazine released at the SAMA conference. Also at the SAMA conference was the global launch of the practical business-to-business book on Strategic Account Management by Peter Browne and Gary Peacock.

Image: Peter Browne (Gordian Business) & Todd Snelgrove (SKF Global)

“In this book Gary and Peter provide some very practical and fresh ways of how to identify, build and grow relationships with individual and corporate customers.  Critically important, for corporate customers, they explain why some relationships work and why some do not work.  But they don’t stop there; they also offer simple tools and thinking models for how you can enable your team to plan how you can work with your key customers from a strategic perspective.”

Lynette Nixon, Industry Fellow, Innovation and Design Thinking at University of Technology, Sydney

So, if you are considering starting a SAM program in your organisation or are already on the journey and need practical advice to maintain your momentum, then pick up a book. The book is available from www.matrixplustraining.com.au or your airport bookshop, or soon download a copy of the ebook from www.amazon.com. 

How to deal with fast-paced negotiations.

Fast-paced negotiations need agility not speed.

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By Stephen Kozicki

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Mahatma Gandhi

I have just returned from projects in Malaysia and Singapore. The region is fast paced, chaotic, and full of opportunities and pitfalls. When dealing with these opportunities and pitfalls I am surprised with how agile successful people and companies are.

Obviously in KL, the news topic was still the missing flight MH 370. There was much discussion around the slow response to the missing plane. Also around the multiple airline officials and government minister’s hasty responses.

Hasty responses often occur in critical negotiations. As the pace of the negotiation increases, there is an increasing danger of a hasty response instead of an agile response.

Successful management teams must become more sophisticated in their negotiations with key accounts. Management teams need to rethink and adapt their approaches for each major customer. Critical negotiations are a great place to learn agility over speed. Agility creates value and hasty responses descend very quickly into price discussions. 

The most powerful method we use to avoid hasty responses in live negotiations is preparing questions. Questions give you control over a fast-paced encounter and they allow you to manage the emotional responses to different approaches. The major benefit of questions is they prevent you making quick statements to defend your position. They also make you prepare better for negotiations with key accounts, you learn to look for real interests and not become blindsided by positions that people take.

Some of the best persuaders – salesmen, negotiators and psychiatrists – persuade with questions rather than statements. The power of questions to generate actions and commitment is well displayed in John Whitmore’s book Coaching for Performance. The only question to avoid is Why? During a negotiation this will produce only a defensive response because the other person sees it as a ‘blame’ question. Few people will answer this question truthfully and it often damages the rapport of a negotiation. Other ways to ask the why question are: what are your reasons for that? or how did you decide to do that? Some well know research in negotiation conducted many years ago showed skilled negotiators used questions twice as often as average negotiators.

To be agile in fast-paced negotiations, prepare good questions and you will avoid hasty responses that will lower your prices.

For unbiased, practical advice when planning for your next negotiation, contact us on +61 (02) 9450 1040 or Stephen@gordianbusiness.com.au. Please share any comments you have and subscribe to our blog at the top right of the page.

Competition – A threat or an opportunity?

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By Stephen Kozicki

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a person.

Kites rise against, not with the wind.

Lewis Mumford

I have just returned from doing 2 projects in Singapore and Malaysia and had the great pleasure of doing field work in both places, meeting senior managers from my client’s strategic accounts.

One of the key messages from each of those senior executives was that their business reality is changing and changing fast, that they are dealing with unprecedented competition in their markets.

One of the industries that I visited was healthcare. Senior executives in that field are facing ever increasing pressure to reduce costs. They often look at suppliers to cut margins to help them meet their hospital’s financial targets.

They’re clear that most suppliers to hospitals in most categories are now selling products that are merely evolving. No more breakthrough products, compared with a decade ago, when product innovation was revolutionary.

Your role as a senior manager in the way you bring value to your top accounts is more important today than ever before. Most industries, like the medical devices segment, are under constant pressure to reduce prices. Too many jump to price reductions and don’t look at a broader value approach.

Competition is a fact of life.

Your competitors constantly threaten your strategic accounts, so you cannot be complacent. You should analyse your key competitors identified in your account plan, and decide how you will respond (not react) to competitor activities that affect your accounts.

Capture intelligence about any key relationships that exist with representatives from your competitors. There are many industries where people tend to move around the major organisations and so have a wide range of relationships across the industry. It is critical to understand these relationships, especially those with your competitors.

You must know what level of influence they have over the buying behaviors of your account contacts.

Do two things; firstly document the products and services supplied to your strategic account by competitors. Secondly, and the harder but more critical, is understand deeply the value that your competitors bring to your major accounts.

Ask yourselves:

• Why does the competitor have some business with the account – really what is ours and their share of wallet?
• How does it fit with the strategy of the strategic account?
• Does the competitor have any competitive advantage that you need to respond to?
• Can they provide unique value beyond the products and services they provide?
• Can this value enable them to build a stronger relationship with the account and threaten your level of business or plans with the account?

Monitoring changes on a regular basis, keeps you on top of potential threats to your accounts. It can also signal a more widespread strategy from competitors that you can prepare for with your other strategic accounts.

Other organisations with whom your account deals are often overlooked in account planning. They may not be competitors or directly affect your organisation, however they can have a significant influence on how you manage your accounts. If you build good relationships with key influencers they can provide invaluable intelligence. Often they have different relationships within the account that can provide new insights. From their different relationships, they may be aware of unstated or emerging issues or opportunities.

A solid account plan, with regular reviews and all relationships monitored provides the potential to turn threats into opportunities. If your strategic account relationships or account planning processes aren’t secure and embedded, are you really prepared for the competition?

For more insights look at: http://www.gordianbusiness.com.au/strategic-account-management/ or contact us on +61 2 9450 1040 or email stephen@gordianbusiness.com.au. Please share your comments below and subscribe at the top right of the page.

Chaotic changes requires agile responses

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by Stephen Kozicki 

The competitive market that we all operate within is changing fast; past successes are not predictors of future success. Your competition is changing and changing fast. The question is are you?

When we work on live negotiations we work hard with our clients to develop a strong value proposition; to know who the key decision makers across the table are and to find the best way to frame the value of the deal. A competitive advantage is now temporary; it is almost deal by deal.

Becoming more complex and chaotic is not just unique to business; it applies to cities and countries. Recently after a long period of economic decline, the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy protection.  My American friends said that we all knew it was coming, but no one was agile enough or courageous enough to take a tough decision.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/detroit-bankruptcy/

When you read some of the comments from the Huffington Post the changes to the car industry did not happen overnight; the changes occurred over a period of time. Too often in business, we hope that the trends we see are not permanent or will not impact our business. Today they often do impact our business with disastrous results.

The purpose of this blog is not to unpack the demise of Detroit, but to ask you these questions:

• Are you seeing chaotic behaviours in your markets by top accounts or erratic competitors?
• Are you making decisions quickly enough?
• Are you agile like a small mountain goat or rigid as a big rock?

In your new operating environment to gain a new competitive approach you need to use your extensive knowledge of: your key decision makers and how you can frame value for them.

Our experience is that great global negotiators spend more time preparing for the negotiation than the average performer. I would assert that there was enough information 15 years ago to allow Detroit to prepare for the chaos ahead and start negotiating for a different outcome. For a long time competition in the car industry had been chaotic. In Detroit their response to tough global competition was to continually drop the price of the cars produced, which meant value suffered.

Your market and competitors will change quickly and often use price as a weapon. Be agile in your response. Don’t drop your prices to match your competitors, leverage value based on your total solution. To find out how to leverage your value in negotiations click here: http://www.gordianbusiness.com.au/negotiating-with-style/.

For unbiased, practical advice when planning for your next negotiation, contact us on +61 (02) 9450 1040 or Stephen@gordianbusiness.com.au. Please share any comments you have and subscribe to our blog at the top right of the page.

The secret of great Global Negotiators

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By Stephen Kozicki

In a consulting project in Beijing, the head of a global IT firm asked “What was the secret of being a successful negotiator?” In fact as they had global customers, “What was the secret of being a successful global negotiator?”

I shared many insights from past blogs, communication, planning, risk taking and cultural differences. She and her team listened intently and took many notes. At the end of the discussion there was plenty of agreement and nodding, but she still pressed for the one key item or the secret to success.

So let me share that with you. It is a secret passed down to me and all of us from Aristotle in his classic book called, Rhetoric.  This is a great book for researchers in the field of communication and negotiation, but a hard read. It’s a source of great knowledge for me in the quest of understanding the secret of negotiation success.

The secret is: balance your negotiation argument with logic and emotion.

I believe that Aristotle’s contribution, in his book Rhetoric, is one of the greatest foundation stones for better negotiation, persuasion, communication and argument that has been written. Sadly somewhere in our now insane politically correct world, the concept of argument as a tool for negotiators and communicators has become a negative word, but it is not.

If this was not a blog, I would spend pages talking about the battle that took place between Sophists, Aristotle and his buddies, (Socrates and Plato). Part of his basic premise was, using both logic and emotion stopped people trying to manipulate others. They could manipulate people with logic by omitting important information or by using guilt or fear to get someone to do something that is not in their best interest.

Aristotle saw the two elements were very persuasive because you the negotiator or communicator had to prepare with both knowledge (logic) and (emotion) to connect and persuade another person to reach an agreement. This took longer because the preparing meant that you had to understand who you were going to negotiate with and what you were trying to achieve.

If you want to read more, I would suggest that you purchase a copy of, “The New History of Classical Rhetoric,” by George A Kennedy, available in any good book store or through Amazon. It is a book that doesn’t just translate, it gives insights and active commentary for you. As noted by Wikipedia, it is generally regarded today as the standard scholarly resource on the classic book, Rhetoric.

To improve your negotiation planning, contact us on +61 2 9450 1040 or at mail@gordianbusiness.com.au .