Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

There are no be-backs: make it happen on the first call

I got a call this past week from a prospect that wants us to deliver an inside sales training course, and one of his main challenges is that his reps aren’t always asking a closing questions when they have the opportunity, and he’s convinced that sales are being lost because of it. And they probably are, because if his reps aren’t asking closing questions, his competitors’ reps probably will. 

I’ve always believed that you have to fully qualify on the first call, and close on the next step, too.  I learned this technique from Bob Tumbleson, so was my boss during the first sales job I ever had. This was an outside sales position, something of a misnomer, because we were at a sales office, and our prospects came in to see us. They visited us because we had a service that interested them. Bob always said that we had to close them on an order when they came in, because they’d never be back. “There are no be-backs,” Bob used to say. My first week on the job, I let a prospect leave who promised to return, and Bob told me that he would use that instance to prove his point. 

And sure enough, the prospect never returned. So I made it a point after that to close every prospect. Sometimes they’d want to go out to the car “to get the checkbook.” I told them that was great, because “I need to get some fresh air, too,” and walked out with them, just in case they decided to drive away without signing up, like they told us they would. This tended to  really flesh out price objections, and we did have some leeway, so I had an 80% close rate. I had no “drive-offs.” Our service was great, too, and just about every prospect became an enthusiastic customer. 

One of my most popular posts is on the subject of the one-call close, and it’s worth reading if you haven’t done so, because it describes how to do this effectively in an 8 minute telephone call. What I learned from Bob Tumbleson years ago, I still believe today. There are no be-backs. You've only got one shot at a conversation, because the prospect may never ever take your call again. This is an extremely important concept for enterprise sales, and it goes without saying that this is critical for transcational sales as well. If you adopt this philosophy and act on it, you’ll close more business faster, and your sales pipeline will be more meaningful, too.  Now that you’re starting a new month/quarter, it’s worth kicking it off by seriously considering this strategy. Add it to your Best Practices Playbook.

4 great techniques for selling in a “down” economy

I got a call this week from a blog subscriber that desperately needed some tips for selling in a "down" economy. Now that summer's here, his prospects are ramping down in terms of their purchases. He's really feeling it at the end of the quarter, and wants to ensure he doesn't have the same situation at the end of the upcoming quarter as well.

The philosophy I teach in my inside sales training courses has always been that you sell all year ‘round just the same as you would when things are tough. Great sales practices should be in place all the time. So here are four tips that are critically important right now. And once you do them consistently, you shouldn't have too many under-quota months:

1) Upsell and cross-sell to your current customers. Your customers already know you. You've done a great job for them, your solutions are working, and they're happy. But if you're ignoring them, you're not only leaving the door open for the competition, but you're missing out on additional sales, I'll bet. Why don't you call to introduce a solution that your customer might not have acquired yet? Even if he or she said "no" in the past, it doesn't mean things haven't changed.

2) In terms of cross-selling, make sure that you are in contact with all corporate entities under your customers' umbrella. You've got a same-enterprise reference, so call all of those other companies. Call high into those companies, tell the exec what you've been doing for his or her colleagues, then get engaged in an initiative at a new same-enterprise company for which your offering is a solution.

3)  Know why every company in your territory is not doing business with you. My old boss Perry Lynne had us keep a record of what he called "lost sales," which told him not only who wasn't buying, but why. And what was surprising was that when we asked, we found a lot of great data, and it opened the door for us at numerous companies. Parenthetically, it was also a great CYA tool if we ever got asked why a company wasn't our customer. If asked, I could simply go to the database, and prove that there was a valid reason. And if there hadn't been a valid reason in the first place, I often had a conversation about it, and that prospect then became my customer.

4) Ask your customers what project they're using your solution on. Customers want to talk about their business more than yours, and if they love your product, they'll tell you how they use it to make their area work more efficiently and effectively. If you do ask this question, I guarantee this: at least once every few conversations, you'll be lead down a path that will open the door to another of your solutions that the customer doesn't yet own. All you have to do is listen.

It's the nature of salespeople to forget about a customer once he or she has placed the order, because money is already "in the bank." If your company is like most, you have a product or engineering team coming up with new exciting stuff that appears once every quarter or so, but you might be so focused on new business that you forget about the people that have already given you their business.

Upselling, cross-selling, knowing why people aren't buying, and asking about your customers' business never go out of style, and using these techniques constantly will keep you out of the sales doldrums, especially in tough times. Add them to your Best Practices Playbook.

What other solutions are you considering? A can’t miss question that will save you time and trouble on RFPs and RFQs

One of my most popular blog posts is the one dealing with getting "shopped" by purchasing folks that ask you to bid on a project that you've already lost. Now that the economy is nicely rebounding, my inside sales training customers are telling me that unsolicited RFPs (requests for proposals) and RFQs (requests for quotes) are starting to come in over the transom, from telephone and email from prospects to whom they've never spoken. 

Answering these blindly without talking to someone first is always a mistake, because in all probability, some competitor of yours has already gotten there, the decision has been made against you, and the person that contacted you did so to do some price comparison for the purpose of grinding your competitor's price down a bit.

So you've really got to have a telephone conversation with the individual requesting the RFP or RFQ. And when you do, you'll always want to ask this great question:

"What other solutions are you considering?"

The answer to this question should tell you where you are in the sales process. It will tell you who got there first, and your follow-on questions will tell you if you have a ghost of a chance to get the business. If a known competitor is involved, I always ask what the prospect likes about the competitor, and if he or she could "wave the magic wand," how could the competitor be better?  I'm looking for holes in my competitor's offering that will open the business for me. If I hear a lot of good about the competitor and no negatives, I'll ask the following tricky question:

"It sounds like you like [competitor] really well. Is there anything preventing you from just going with them?"

And one of two things will happen. The prospect will come clean and tell you he or she is doing "due diligence," another term for "you lose." Or, as has happened a few times in my own sales world, the contact will tell me that there are some perceived issues with the competitor that weren't flushed out earlier. Now we've got something going!

Of course there are other factors of importance, too. What is the title of the individual that is asking for the RFQ? If he or she is in Purchasing or HR, it's far enough away from your technology focus area that you're probably being shopped. In this case, I'd recommend calling high into your product solution area, and talk to an exec that can tell you if an initiative is on the table. If so, you may be able to break into the sales process and get some real traction.

Unless you're dealing in commodities, unsolicited RFPs and RFQs are always a red flag. And even in commodities sales, you do want to have a conversation before you take the time to craft a proposal and put it in your sales pipeline. It's always worth doing a check up to ensure that your company is the front-runner. Add those all-important front-end conversations to your Best Practices playbook.

Taking over an industry, one Sales 2.0 step at a time

This past week I delivered an inside sales training course to a client that makes devices used to diagnose electrical problems. This company makes terrific equipment, has begun to take market share away from its biggest competitor (who owns 90% of the market), and has hired me to train their inside sales team to take over and own the market in one year. In a coaching session that occurred last week, we cooked up some bright ideas that the competition probably won't be using. I'm going to tell you what they are, but I'm not going to divulge the client or the industry to protect our program. I've been teaching the techniques we're using for years now, but there are a few new twists because of some tools we're using today that fall into the Sales 2.0 realm. So read on, and use them to take over your focus industry as well.

My client has sold many devices into the mining industry, but there are a whole lot of mining concerns that haven't yet bought its equipment. One non-client is pretty well known, but has gone through bankruptcy proceedings in recent years, and we suspected there might be new owners. We googled the company, and found a story about them on Wikipedia, giving the new name of the company. We then did a search in the "people" field of LinkedIn, searching for the name of the new company. And we found a TQM (Total Quality Management) director.

We cold-called the TQM director and told her that we specialized in troubleshooting devices for the mining industry, and she referred us to the right executive in charge of that function. We're now on a roll with that company. There are three very good lessons to learn from this story, and you can apply them all today. One is about turning a "horizontal" solution into a "vertical" one. Another is intelligently using internet tools that are still considered a bit non-traditional. And the third is that there's nothing as good as a great cold call.

1) The Vertical piece. My client specializes in a solution, not an industry. But because the company has sold successfully into the mining industry, it is a de facto expert in mining solutions that relate to its devices. My client's reps are going to call every mining concern in the country. And I predict they'll soon own that segment in the market, because they're experts, and they're telling new prospects about it.

2) The Research piece. To uncover data we had to know, we used Google, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn. Sure our target prospect had prior trouble. But like many companies, they've been bailed out. They changed the name of the company, and are geared up again and making money. LinkedIn enabled us to find an individual we couldn't have found otherwise.

3) The Cold Call piece. The rep I coached loves cold calling. He's completely fearless, doesn't give a fig about rejection, and has an attitude that in reflective of the fact that he won't let anybody kick him around.

We're using a number of superior techniques to take over an industry, step by step, vertical by vertical. I've just described three of them. Thinking out-of-the-box and being fearless are two of the supporting elements that need to be in place for it all to work, and my client's reps are already making huge strides in that direction. Add those three techniques to your Best Practices playbook, and go out and tackle an industry yourself, starting this week.

7 Ways to make an Underperforming Territory profitable, fast

It's fairly common for superior sales performers to be rewarded by being transferred to an underperforming territory. Rarely is the sales rep happy about it, and it's probably happened to a large percentage of you reading this. If it hasn't happened to you yet, get ready, for it may. In my telesales training courses, I always tell people that our world is a lot about constant change, and how well we handle it. Today's post is about how a really great rep got a lemon and made lemonade out of it. I worked with Gordon at a software development tools company, and saw him take control of what had been a terrible territory, work it, and make it one if he best territories in the company within a very few months. Even though the product line we're talking about was technical, his story can apply to anyone selling anything in a territory that has traditionally been a poor earner. Here's what he did:

First of all, he wanted to know which companies weren't buying our tools, and why, so he made a list of the biggest companies in all of the states in his new territory. In his first week in the territory, he made a telephone call blitz, and found that there were two types of non-buying prospects: those in which upper management (e.g. VPs of Engineering) made the decisions against us, and those where upper management didn't care, but instead had empowered Project Managers and Developers to make their own decisions and select their own tools.

Not surprisingly, he found that many of his prospects had never been called, or hadn't been called in months. Gordon started making extensive charts of the types of software development projects that these companies were working on, and became an expert in project knowledge. Gordon was a great salesperson, but he was non-technical. All he wanted to know was what they were building, who would buy the finished product, and what types of tools the engineers used. So he ended up with two charts (today, you'd call them spreadsheets): "Nonbuyer Reasons and Personnel," and "Project Classifications." Then he really went to work.

He had inherited several decent customers, called high, and found that there were many projects starting at those companies for which development tools had not been selected. He leveraged his VP contact, and sold a lot of new product to those companies (within 6 months, he'd doubled the previous year's sales on current customers alone). He also uncovered many opportunities at companies that hadn't been called in awhile. They were now in his sales pipeline, after less than one month in the new territory.

But there were still some companies that wouldn't buy, because they didn't like our company. He was able to determine that the VP of Engineering at a huge prospect company had a sister, and she was married to the Director of Sales at one of our competitors. That company had standardized on our competition, and Gordon knew he'd never get a sale there as long as upper management stayed the same. At other companies, Gordon found that individual engineers and project managers had prejudices against our development tools (too bad, because our tools were superior), and would work to ensure our tools were never placed.

In his new territory, many development teams were in a state of flux. Some companies were downsizing their departments, and engineers were getting laid off, and having a challenging time finding work. By this time, he knew about different engineers levels of expertise, and he also knew how they felt about our products. So here's what he did: since he was calling all over the territory anyway, he started asking if they were hiring engineers. If they were, Gordon would check his list. If an engineer looking for work loved our products, Gordon found him or her work at companies were he wanted to get more business. He got advocates at new companies that way. And if engineers didn't like our products, he found them positions at that big company with the VP whose sister was married to his competition. Gordon figured if he had engineers in his territory that didn't like our solutions, it was best having them all work in one place, in a company that for political reasons would never buy our development tools anyway. In essence, Gordon played his territory like a chessboard, shifting the pieces from one square to another. He was able to do this because he probably called more people in the territory than anyone had before, asked great questions, took good notes, and plotted things on charts. He turned two of the states in this underperforming territory into two of the most profitable in our company in under a year.

So what can be learned from Gordon?

1) An underperforming territory can be an opportunity waiting to flourish.
2) Call high, and ask great questions to determine why people aren't buying.
3) Ensure that you're providing as many solutions as possible to companies that are already your customers.
4) Know your prospect's business, so you can figure out how your product can help your prospect to make money faster, or stop losing money.
5) Make enough calls that you can be considered a territory expert.
6) Develop your own analyses tools and charts to understand what's happening (or happened) over time, not just what happened today.
7) Think out of the box. In Gordon's case, he improved the lives of his advocates, and they remembered the favor he did for them.

As Gordon would tell you, you have to work hard, but you also have to work smart. Add Gordon's techniques to your Best Practices Playbook for selling successfully to an underperforming territory.

Don’t miss low-hanging fruit… Prioritize calling the best leads that money can’t buy NOW, before your competition does

At this time of year, salespeople are typically focused on two things: closing prospects that are already in the pipeline, and managing new leads that are coming in through trade shows, downloads, you-name-it. But you've already got a better lead source than those new leads, and they're sitting in your CRM sales database. Let me explain, because if you ignore what's in your CRM, you're missing some hidden but active sales opportunities, and working hard, not smart.

Two weeks ago, I made a printout of every month of activity on last year's calendar, including all calls to my telesales training prospects. Loads of those calls I made last year never resulted in conversations. In just about every one of those cases, I finally left a voicemail as a last resort. Like most voicemails, they didn't get returned. So I decided to set up a call blitz after the first of the year, and call every one of those prospects from last year. I made loads of calls every day. And guess what? Lots of them were interested, and I loaded up my pipeline for the new year!

It turns out that they never returned my calls last year because they had no money and didn't think it had any value to tell me. Most of them remembered my name. Some of them didn't. But the fact was that if they were good enough to call last year, I had already determined that they were viable prospects. They still are, but they're "warmer" now, because they heard my name a few times last year. Many of them are from very large companies. And now my pipeline is jam-packed with these formerly "dead" prospects.

So what can you learn from this? You most probably will have a higher "hit" ratio from people who already know who you are or have heard of your company. Many prospects that had a need for your solution but didn't have budget last year, DO have budget this year. You've already put a bit of time in calling these prospects, and you don't want your competition to get the business now because all of a sudden budget arrived, and you didn't call! So here's a formula that will accelerate your sales cycle. It takes a little extra work, but will put more money in your pocket this year, and faster:

1) Get a prospect printout of last year's calls, by month. Sort by company name, and be sure to put the name and title of the prospect in the readout, too. If you can't set the print parameters on your own, ask your in-house CRM guru to do it for you. That's why you have the CRM in the first place.

2) Take the printout home and carve out a couple of weekend hours to highlight every company you'll want to call again. Focus on large companies as well as prospects that had a need, but no budget.

3) When you get back to work on Monday, begin by calling every prospect from last year that is working at a company that is a customer of your company's, anywhere in the world. There may be exceptional opportunities to cross sell, upsell, and reference sell with these people. Next, call companies that had a need, but no money. Finally, call all those really big companies that you want to have as customers.

4) Allocate at least three hours every day for outbound calling to this list, and "hard schedule" it so you'll really do it, without interruptions. It's better qualified than any new list you'll get, because it focuses on established needs, leveraging current customer relationships, and making something happen at big prospect companies.

Don't let your competition grab the business you spent so much time cultivating. This process I've described is working for me right now and it can work for you, too. Add it to your Best Practices Playbook.

 

Working your territory better: Are you reading your trade mags?

One of the complaints I most often hear from inside sales reps that take my telesales courses is that they don't get enough leads. Whether you get your leads from lists, whitepaper downloads, your own lead qualification reps, or any other source, you're probably missing a significant amount of business in your territory if you're not subscribing (and reading!) at least one trade publication that addresses experts in your solution area. This is really an old-fashioned idea, and one that still works. Best of all, I'll bet your competitors aren't doing it. So today's post is about beating your competition. And I'll give you a real-world example of what I'm talking about, because it worked for me, and the publication still exists. If you sell into the market I sold into, you can use it too. And if you don't, you can take my story and plug it into your solution set and prospect base, too, and go out and subscribe to a magazine that fits your needs similarly.

Back when I was an inside rep, I sold software and application development tools like debuggers, in-circuit emulators, and regression testers. Our standard trade publications were the EE Times, Dr. Dobb's Journal, and a few others. But the one I loved was Crosstalk, the Journal of Defense Engineering. That publication, published at Hill Air Force Base, addressed issues and situations involving how the Department of Defense built and maintained software (still does). Every issue was packed with information on who was building what. I subscribed free (you still can), and every month I'd take a couple of hours out of my Saturday, skim it (still do, I'm hooked), and highlight names and projects. Monday I'd call those highlighted folks and made sure they knew about my solutions and what we did. And man, did I sell a lot of stuff to the DoD. Most of those folks were experts, and rarely showed up on lists. The only way I could find them was by reading about them. And they always enjoyed talking to me because I'd read about them.

So here's where I'm going with this. Whatever you sell, there are trade publications where experts in your industry talk about solutions. I want you to subscribe to a paper copy, so you can get away from your computer on the weekend, sit in an easy chair with a highlighter, and skim material that will be important to you. Seriously carve out a couple of weekend hours to do it. I don't recommend doing this online, because everything else in the world gets in the way, email, YouTube, and random thoughts turned to web searches. And when you do allocate time to digest the material, what will happen is this: you'll get names of high level people, and you'll finding out what's bugging them that your solution can help fix. Unbelievably, your voicemails will get returned, admins will put you through, and you'll have real productive conversations because you'll know an awful lot about the business your prospects are in, from the inside out. I train and coach hundreds of telesales reps each year, and I know most of them aren't doing this (they should be, after my classes, though). So if you're having a slow time getting to prospects in these tough economic times, ensure that you're reading and working those trade mags. As Gomez Addams used to say, "Ahh, the old ways are best." So add mining those trade publications to your Best Practices Playbook to find those important and lucrative prospects you'd otherwise never find.

Have you met your competitor yet? Maybe you should.

Since I first designed and taught my first telesales training courses in 1990, I've been competing with a number of people and companies. One in particular operates in my nearby geographical space and has the same customer focus. There are very big differences in our training philosophies, and those clear differentiators make it fairly easy for the prospect to make a decision. So the other day, this competitor and I found ourselves in the same room, because we were making presentations on our training programs to the same people. She's been in business for 15 years, and we'd never been in the same place at the same time! This competitor has a reputation for being a very nice person, so I walked up to her, introduced myself, and told her I was delighted to meet a person that everyone liked so much. Even though we compete consistently, we became pretty good buddies that day. It really is possible to like your competitor.

I'm blogging on this because maybe one day you'll be working a trade show or seminar, and your competitor will have a nearby booth. Yes, I know you dislike the competition, that's how you've been trained, right? But I want you to consider a different approach. Go over and introduce yourself. Pay him or her sincere compliment to break the ice (you can always say "you're a tough competitor," which doesn't give away any trade secrets). What you'll find is that your competitor is probably like you, friendly, tenacious, and smart. You can talk shop a little. And these two things will occur:

1) You'll find out a lot more about how your competitor is selling against you. Five or ten minutes with another person can tell you a lot about how he or she communicates.

2) You'll be making a contact that could be beneficial for your career, future-wise. Very few of us stay with one company forever. You want everyone --- including your competitors --- to know you're a major player. Your competitor will change companies, you'll change companies. Companies are bought, sold, merged, and go out of business every day. That competitor across the aisle may eventually be your best buddy, and you may each end up working for the same company one day.

There's a really antiquated business model that says "hate the competition," that really doesn't hold much value in today's world. In the very last sales job I had, prior to starting my sales training company, I sold a product called the Atron Evaluator. It competed against Mercury Interactive's TestRunner. I beat up on Mercury a lot, and placed a lot of my product. Years later, I ended up training their entire inside sales team. At least one rep I trained there was active at Mercury years before when I was directly competing with them. He was a great guy, and we had fun talking about my old product that afternoon during a break. I'm sure I would have loved meeting him years before too, when we were actively selling against each other. Regardless of what upper management may be telling you, there's no reason to despise your competitors. You should respect them and outsell them. But also remember that your competitors are also colleagues. You have common problems, goals, and objectives. For the most part, if they weren't friendly, smart, and honest, they wouldn't be in high tech sales, either.

To sum up, I'm really glad I met my sales training competitor the other day. We had a great conversation, then went back the next day and started competing against each other again. I feel that I've met a friendly colleague, and it made my day. I've never believed in "slamming the competition" because it's just not professional. You build a lot more credibility with the prospect by complimenting some aspect of your competition, while clearly stating the differentiators that make your solution a better choice. So next time you have the opportunity at a trade show or other industry event, I'd like you to consider running over and meeting your competitor, and adding this important step in building your social and intelligence network to your Best Practices Playbook.

 

What to do when your competition is cheaper (and maybe better!)

This has got to be one of the more serious sales objections in any salesperson's day, and because technology is moving so rapidly, can occur at almost any time. I'll tell you how it happened to me, and what I did about it.

I once sold a hardware-based software debugger, a great product, and we sold thousands for $5000 each. One day, a new competitor came up with a product that did a lot of what ours did, and sold for $400. We tested it, and it was a great product! The only feature difference was that it didn't have something called hardware breakpoints, a feature that not all software developers needed. So I had to reposition our product. I never like to knock the competition, so I decided a good approach was to "damn with faint praise" and position our competitor into a small corner of the developer world. Our prospects and customers were savvy buyers and read all the journals, and a large percentage of them started asking how our product, which cost ten times more, stacked up against theirs. And even if they didn't need hardware breakpoints, here's how I responded. Let's call their product the ABC Debugger:

"ABC makes a really good product, and it's terrific if you're building a home software program to run a sprinkler system. But if you're in serious production mode, and have a hard timeline for getting a product to market, our debugger is the only way to go."

Of course, I had to sell the value of hardware breakpoints, too, even if the value wasn't perceived initially. You know that I place a real value on asking ROI questions, which I teach today in my telesales training courses, so I knew what they were building, who their customers were, and had an idea of how much revenue that product was going to produce for them. My customers' concerns about product rollout timefames turned out to be way more important than a $4500 cost differential per unit, and our sales never faltered. Within a year, our own engineers developed a new flagship product that sold for $20,000 and was wildly successful, but we never stopped successfully selling our $5000 debugger, either.

Damning with faint praise is a great technique when your prospect brings up the name of a worthy competitor. Use it along with your important ROI questions, and add it to your Best Practices Playbook. And if you have another way to handle this sales objection that's worked successfully for you, tell us about it!

Do I mention the competition first?

I regularly monitor a few sales websites, and a good question was posed the other day about whether to openly discuss the competitor's solution, or totally avoid mentioning the competition. I'm pretty opinionated on this. Here's my answer, followed by a brief explanation:

"I will never be the first to bring up the name of a competitor. But I will always ask "What other solutions are you considering?" I not only want to find out who is competing with me, but also want to get a sense of the prospect's global ideas about solving the problem. Also, be wary that your prospect may have already made a decision to go with the competition, but is "shopping" you to get price data to use to lower the price of the already-chosen solution. When I was purchasing solutions myself, I did this to salespeople all the time. I've blogged on this shopping practice, and what to do about it at http://www.alextrain.com/inside-sales-telesales-tips-blog/bid/5564/RFP-Hazards-Are-you-being-shopped-by-Purchasing-Agents-Here-s-how-to-fix-it   "

I'm a real believer in never bringing up the name of a competitor before the prospect does, and it's just one of the things I teach in my telesales training courses. When you do that, you place the competitor on a peer level with you, and I can almost guarantee that if your prospect hasn't talked with your competition, he or she almost certainly will right after you've hung up the phone. In one fell swoop, you've brought your competition into the sales picture.

Occasionally, the prospect will ask who you compete with. I hope you've already asked great qualification questions that will uncover reasons that your solution is the best in the marketplace for the prospect, and you'll have a unique value proposition that argues that you have the best solution. So my response to the question about my competitors goes something like this: "There are a number of companies competing in this space, Jerry. Based on what you've told me, we're the one that is by far your best solution, for the following reasons [name them]. The reason I work for [my company] is that we provide the best solution in the marketplace, and my customers get exceptional support and get taken care of really well. If I thought any of the companies that compete with us were better, I'd be working for them."

Savvy prospects (and they're all savvy) hunt around the web for different solutions, and mostly they're testing you to see how you'll respond to the "competition" question. Going back to the days long ago when I was a purchasing agent myself, I'd always ask every vendor salesperson who he or she competed with. Many of the salespeople weren't sophisticated enough to provide an answer like I gave in the paragraph above. So I'd call 5 or so vendors, get the names of the competitors from them, then rank those competitors based on the number of times they got mentioned. Much of the time, I'd choose a vendor based on that ranking, then negotiate a lower price based on the price data I'd gotten from the others. Don't you fall into this trap!

So now you've got a great way to handle the "competition question" and ensure that you're dealing with future price negotiation issues at the same time. Add it to your Best Practices Playbook. And if you have another way of dealing with the question that's been effective for you, tell us about it!

Next week's blog post: What to do when your competition is cheaper (and maybe better!)