Welcome to Selling What's Possible, the podcast that's pushing the boundaries of modern account sales. I'm your host, David Irwin, CEO of Polaris I/O and a veteran with 30 years of experience in successful account sales programs.
In each episode, we'll dive deep into the world of strategic account development, uncovering innovative approaches and fresh perspectives that you may not have considered before. We'll be joined by top sales professionals, revenue leaders, and dynamic innovators who are reshaping the landscape of account sales.
Whether you're navigating the complexities of key accounts or seeking to expand value-driven outcomes for your customers, this podcast is your guide to consistently growing your strategic account relationships.
Get ready to challenge conventional wisdom, explore new methodologies, and unlock the full potential of your account sales strategies. This is Selling What's Possible - where we turn potential into reality.
Dave Irwin (00:00)
Welcome to Selling What's Possible, I'm your host Dave Erwin and joining me today is Ron Hubsher. He is CEO of Sales Optimization Group. He is a master negotiator and author.
as well of closing time and consults with some of the world's largest brands and speaks at all sorts of events and is called upon as an expert to render great insights on how to best negotiate value. And our topic today is going to be around account negotiations through the lens of co-creating value. So Ron, welcome to Selling What's Possible. We appreciate you coming here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about
your background, your company, and how you became so passionate about negotiations.
Ron Hubsher (00:48)
Dave, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. Love everything that you do and love your thought leadership. It's really wonderful. And I think everyone can learn a ton from you. So thank you for having me on. Just a little background about our organization. We're in a company called the Sales Optimization Group. We help the leading sales forces negotiate and close deals, command price premiums, and create great long-term customers. And we do sales and sales negotiation training.
And the way we got into the negotiation piece was one of our clients said, hey, Ron, we really don't negotiate well. Go find us a good negotiation vendor or trainer. And just like someone said, find a good sales training vendor. If you want question-based selling skills, there's a whole bunch of them that are very good. If you want an opportunity plan, there's a whole bunch of them that are good. But when it came to negotiation, we found that some people specialized. First off, saying when you look at the negotiation field, negotiation is a big word.
It's like saying, hey, I'm good at math. Well, what does that mean? Are you good at addition, subtraction, multiplication, calculus, differential equations? They're all different types of mathematics. And the same is true of negotiation. One type of negotiation is conflict resolution.
And that's a very different negotiation than a business to business sales negotiation, where you want to the deal, command a price premium, and create a great long-term customer.
And what we found is no one had really studied business to business sales negotiation. So we saw that there was a hole in opportunity marketplace. And we just went out and we just asked the best business to business salespeople, how do you negotiate in closed deals? We'd interview Winston Churchill, no hostage negotiation, right? None of that stuff. And we came up with a really simple seven step process. And the really interesting thing is if you try and use conflict resolution negotiation or spot transactional negotiation to a business to business sales negotiation,
Dave Irwin (02:18)
Yeah.
Ron Hubsher (02:34)
you'll oftentimes do more harm than good. However, if you learn business to business sales negotiation paradigm, because it is more complex, because the other side doesn't have to negotiate with you, they can always stick with the status quo or go with your competitors who looks very similar to you. It's more complex. The outcomes may be not as drastic, but it's technically more complex and it's backwards compatible. So you can use it really well for conflict resolution and spot transaction negotiation. That makes sense, Dave?
Dave Irwin (03:01)
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, let's dig into the concept of co-creating value.
in the context of, enterprise accounts, there's so many areas where the opportunity to co-create value starts. Do you have a point of view on when you recognize that opportunity, how do you set the table in the right way from the get-go so that as you advance through your negotiation principles, you're starting from the right place?
Ron Hubsher (03:31)
The two most important principles are you have to be the buyer's number one choice. And if you're not the buyer's number one choice, they're really negotiating with you to beat down the price of the real winner, your competition in the future. And companies don't buy price, they buy risk. And if in your sales process you can show you're the least risky solution, then you've earned the right to command the price premium. And risk comes in two forms.
business risk and personal risk. And you want to lower both those risk profiles. And then the second law is you want to the value you create. And by offering additional value or showing people both value from a corporate basis, which you can quantify and dollarize, and also from a personal basis. How, know, by implementing this program, Dave, or implementing the system, you'll be able to go home and, you know, coach your son or daughter's basketball game, right? So you always want to look for ways you can create more value, which is going to put you in that number one choice.
in both a risk, in a business risk and personal risk. So you always want to be looking for, what are the areas that we're not addressing today? First of all, let's quantify the value we're creating from both a personal risk and a business risk point of view.
the value that we're creating today, and how can we make this relationship even better for you? And this is one of the things that I think is brilliant about your thought leadership, Dave, which I really enjoy and I learned from, is we in sales, we're trained to think about additional white space, right? Which means we look at our product line and say, hey, I don't know how our current products are performing, but what else can we sell them?
as opposed to creating blue space, which would be, hey, what extra value can we bring to them? And that value we realize both on a business basis and a personal basis.
Dave Irwin (05:09)
Gotcha. yeah, working backwards from a customer's problem or challenge, and then infusing the conversation with both this concept of how do I create the lowest risk profile while also creating an additive value exchange, puts you in that, hopefully, number one spot or best spot or best choice or the most intriguing option.
Ron Hubsher (05:37)
Right, by exactly Dave, and by adding more value and showing how you can bring more value to the company, you raise Dave's profile and you enhance his career opportunities. And you actually take him from doing tactical daily stuff to more strategic stuff and give him free up more time for either family life or career oriented things. So yes, absolutely.
Dave Irwin (05:59)
account teams have to navigate often 12 to 20 different executive buyers in negotiating a deal, a sale, a contract expansion, a renewal, whatever it is, right? There's always multiple people at the table. How do you think about negotiations? Do you link it to each person and then in the aggregate?
Do you really focus on the executive wallet owner? Do you have to tie off with everybody? It seems like a lot of people, it's become more complex and you almost have to pay attention to all the people involved and pay off this risk profile value exchange with each person at some level.
Ron Hubsher (06:47)
Dave, that's a really great question. And one of the things that we advise all our clients is for every decision maker, regardless of where they are in the organization, I always have just a really simple chart. What's their personal benefit from us winning? And what's their business benefit? And business benefit, they'll always be able to talk about in a Zoom call or a Teams call full of five people or whatever the number of people that they'll talk about freely.
I want to their personal benefit as well. And then if it's comfortable relationship enough, you can ask, how has it benefited you personally? Has it freed up more time? Has it made you look good? And you've got the corporate cold star. What are the things that you're trying to accomplish?
And how can I help you accomplish that further? What are your other big challenges? What are your, you know, what's on your critical list? What's on your wish list? How can we help you realize that? So you're taking your already great relationship and bringing it to another level.
And I think that's part of the genius of what you talk about in your blue space. Really putting it into their terms, right? So how can we help you solve their problems that other people, that you've solved for other people in positions similar to them.
Dave Irwin (07:55)
Yeah, The concept of blue space being, you know, working backwards from problems, aggregating those problems by category instead of white space, which is very product centric, all about the seller. It's really all about the buyer. And so you were commenting earlier that the more problems you can solve, the more in aggregate you can create value in more areas, you sort of gain or elevate.
your value position.
How does that help you in your negotiation position from your point of
Ron Hubsher (08:26)
Yeah, and
I always think you sort of want to triage where you are in any kind of negotiation, right? If you're in the current account, are you in the hole? there problems or there issues, right? Are people unhappy? Have we not proved our value to them yet? So we want to get back from out of the hole, like, know, fix any problems, fix any service issue. Let's quantify the value that we're creating for them. Let's not make sure, you know, if they call them to customer success and there's a little issue with feature number 173, okay, you know, no software is perfect and could be user error, could be software
could be anything, right? But let's confirm other than that issue, how's the system working for you, right? it's doing great. How's it affecting your business? Okay, great. So you always want to reframe in any interaction. You always want to reframe and reconfirm the value you're creating. And that just gets you back to even, right? And they may renew with you because the cost of ripping out a system or taking it away is too painful, but they're not going to love you.
So you want to go from in the hole to even, but you want them to be so in love with you. Like, what are the things that we can do for you in the future? We specialize in working with executives just like you. In addition to solving this problem, which our current system does solve,
They also have these business issues and we've been able to help them solve them. Are those the kind of things that you're having or tell me the business issue you're having and how we can even elevate it and make it even more impactful for you. We start with a kernel of goodness and help people recognize the goodness with you. And now here's how we're to take it to another level. Okay. So we've helped you with your sales issue. Let's help you with your marketing issue or let's help you with the production issue. Here are things that we can do that continue more, more value to you. That's going to elevate you as a
professional
and in both your business career and your personal career. I think a lot of customer success teams, they don't, or account management teams, don't reconfirm the value they're creating. And oftentimes they'll let the drum beat of a little issue. No product's perfect. Things are going to happen, whether it's perceived or not perceived.
You know, let's go, okay, aside from that issue, let's solve that issue. But aside from that, how are the, you know, 174 of the features working for you? great. It's doing this. What are the business implications? What are the personal implications? Right now we got them back to even or ahead. Now we want to bring them to the whole next level where it's like, boy, you know, Dave, what other issues are you having? Right. What, what, what's keeping you up at night? How can we help you solve those issues? and take it from a, a Dave perspective or that executive buyer perspective as opposed to.
hey, you we got product number C. You don't have product number C on our chart, right? And I think that's the beauty and the genius in the way you architect that blue space of what are the problems people are having and how can we help them solve those problems?
Dave Irwin (11:10)
Yeah, I love what you're saying because selling what's possible is really a more expansive view of how to bring more value to an account. I've always noticed account teams get kind of pigeonholed. You get stuck in sort of servicing what's installed already. Next thing you know, it's dominating the account relationship and the mind share of the account team. And the account team isn't connecting more ways to drive value for the customer. So I think
Your recommendation of sort of, you know, identify those, those executives that carry, broader influence across the organization, find out more ways to help them and advocate for that. So you can elevate out of the sort of status quo to that next level. I've also noticed, when teams do that, when people do that well, account executives with key account stakeholders, key account stakeholders learn to trust them as a go-to.
as place to get problem solved and they just go back there over and over again and it really creates a, as you said, a situation where the customer is just coming to you proactively, which is really a great end state, you know.
Ron Hubsher (12:22)
And I think a lot of account teams, they tend to be a little reactive in the sense that they're dealing with a current issue, the current problem, the latest thing that popped up, the latest fire. We just put out this fire. We just put out this fire. And oftentimes, you have to take a step back and help the customer understand, OK, nothing is perfect all the time. We'll put out that fire. But other than that fire, how is this helping your business? So anytime you're on the call with a customer,
A typical account team, especially in customer success, some end user, John, will have an issue. They may use a system wrong. It's like, I'm so frustrated because I couldn't do this. And you might just solve that problem. then you think, OK, that's good. But you've got to go back and say, hey, John, how's everything else working? How are other things working? great, great. What are the other areas where can help you? So it changes the relationship from a reactive position, where they're calling in with issues, to, we see the value. And now, hey, what else can we do for you?
So really proactively helping them succeed in their business.
Dave Irwin (13:22)
I think that's great. So to get there, one of the things that is so critical, it seems, is situational awareness, understanding what's happening at the customer.
I have a phrase around continuous relevancy is core to success. so things change all the time, right? At a buying company, a global enterprise account, there's always new issues, problems, factors showing up, changes in leadership. mean, the amount of things that happen that affect a situation are constant.
how would you look at your negotiating position tied to relevancy? Are they connected? And how so?
Ron Hubsher (14:07)
Dave, absolutely. So I always think there's two things you need to negotiate well. The first is you have to put a supportive sales account management and the account management and sales process in place. That creates the potential to negotiate well. If you combine that with a strong negotiation plan, you'll capitalize on that potential. If you have a weaker nomagism plan, you'll squander that potential. So there's no magic or abracadabra. So when we go in and we train sales organization, say, there's no magic or abracadabra. Let me go for poor sales effort.
a strong sales effort or account management effort is actually critical to negotiate well. So it's absolutely critical. And one of the things, this is funny, this is just before the call that I was on you with Dave, we were talking about one client and now what they've done is they set up a week, I'm sorry, a monthly, in addition to QBRs, they have a monthly call to stay relevant. Hey, what are the issues that we're having today?
Where are you going tomorrow? What's new? What's changed?
How can we help you drive out costs? What are the things that we can do to help further save you money? And they start looking at you as a profit center, not a cost center.
Dave Irwin (15:08)
Yeah, that's great.
I think when teams do that well, customers react incredibly positively because it doesn't happen that often. It's a competitive advantage if you can do that consistently with your accounts over time and be well informed and knowledgeable along the way. And all that helps improve negotiation.
Ron Hubsher (15:28)
Yeah. And surprisingly, what I always think is really interesting, if you just set up a monthly call with your best customers or all your customers, ideally, the first two calls may take 10 minutes, 15 minutes, a half hour, an hour, whatever it might be. And sometimes they're just checking calls. Any changes and anything new? What else can we do for you? No, we're all good. And it could be a five minute call and it's all good. And you know, we're just rolling out this. Okay, good. Is there anything we can help you with? And a little thing may turn into a big thing, or you just know everything's good. You want to quantify that we're delivering value.
verify everybody's happy and be in a proactive stance with them.
Dave Irwin (16:04)
Yeah, that's just great advice for account teams to think about. to wrap things up, thinking about negotiations and how to protect and grow and retain these large scale enterprise account relationships over time, what would be sort of your
your key takeaway that you would recommend people think about.
Ron Hubsher (16:26)
Yeah, so I'll give you three. There are others, but I'll give you the top three. One is you have to be the buyer's number one choice, and you do that by lowering their risk, both business risk and personal risk. Two, you want to the value you create, you want to quantify it, and you want to look for more places where you can add additional value, right? So you can continue to add value. You want to think about where you are in a relationship. Are you behind? Are you in the hole? OK, then we need to get them even.
And don't try renew people when you're even.
And then one thing we didn't touch upon, but I always look about is what are things that you can do to continue to expand the relationship that are a dollar for dollar discount and what do you want to get in return? So maybe they need extra training or maybe, you know, an extra admin or invite them to your user conference or give them, Hey, you know, Dave, I got five free tickets to our user conference. Why you come on down and bring some people down there.
So think about ways where you can get them more engaged and more active and using more of what they already have. And in return, let's lock in a longer term relationship. So those are three or four takeaways that I would think sort of a quick overview.
Dave Irwin (17:30)
Yeah, that's great. think some of the key principles you've been advocating is when you think about the business value and the business risk, the personal value and the personal risk, both are so important to the executive buyer. And a lot of times you'll be surprised by what they value, which may be, as you said, additional exposure at a conference or...
more service support or just access to thought leadership. And a lot of times companies overlook bundling these things that they take for granted, but that the account actually values highly, which is know-how or expertise or experience, things like that. And I think what you're saying is you can bundle some of those softer benefits in, they may hold a lot more value, but you got to understand, right, what's important to them.
from a business and a personal perspective, each person's thought. And I guess you gather that by asking them and meeting with them frequently and taking notes and absorbing that and documenting it, right? And mapping it.
Ron Hubsher (18:35)
Yeah, and Dave, you raise a really great point. For one of our clients, they would just want to raise their professional profile and become more publicly known. So we got them speaking opportunities at different conferences, which had huge value to that person on a very personal basis. So you want to look at ways, hey, do you want to speak at a user conference? Would that be great? Would that be a high profile thing? Or do you want to contribute to our newsletter? Do you want to be in our customer advisory board? All these things that raise their position as well makes them feel good about themselves and create a better
a deeper bond and a deeper relationship between your organization and their organization.
Dave Irwin (19:09)
Yeah, terrific. Great stuff. Well, thank you. How does our audience reach out to you, connect to you? What would be ways for, what's the best way that you would recommend people contact you?
Ron Hubsher (19:20)
First of all,
anybody can email me, rhubshare at sales og. So sales og is an original gangster. So I thought you'd like that, Dave, but a different image. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, we're on Hubshare. Or feel free, anyone's welcome to download a complimentary copy of a book, Closing Time, The Seven Immutable Laws of Sales Negotiation,
Dave Irwin (19:29)
That's good.
Ron Hubsher (19:41)
But we always look, I always look at this as start of a great relationship. So anyone feel free to email me or call me or go on our website. Appreciate it.
I just say a final thing and this is for anybody who's listening. Dave, I love your thought leadership and I think if people are not familiar with your concept of blue space versus white space, it's something they should really wholeheartedly embrace. And I just thought it was really, I see a lot of great thought leadership and I thought this was something that just really shook me out of my seat and said, wow, this is something that every organization should embrace. So I appreciate your great thought leadership.
Dave Irwin (20:18)
Thanks very much, Ron. Thanks for joining us today. Okay, bye-bye.
Ron Hubsher (20:21)
My pleasure, Dave. Thank you.