Unlocking Fortune 500 Deals: Insider Tips To Land Large Accounts With Jonathan Gardner [Episode 164]

Unlocking Fortune 500 Deals: Insider Tips To Land Large Accounts With Jonathan Gardner

I got an amazing guest for you. His name is Mr. Jonathan Gardner and Jonathan is an expert in many things but one of the things we are going to talk about is how you as a company can go after the Fortune 500 space and get business. Believe it or not, no matter what size company you are, you have the ability to get large names.

I know this because I personally have done this, and I didn’t have large companies at that time. We were able to get NASCAR. Large universities. We are able to get Procter & Gamble, Intuit, CBS Television, and things like that. There’s a process to it and we are going to talk about the process of how you can land a very large account, but do it profitably.

Landing large accounts at a loss isn’t usually a good thing to do. Jonathan’s skilled in landing large accounts. He was on the other side of the fence in major corporations like Starbucks and Dell and others. He’s going to give you the information from what the other side of the fence is thinking, what we are thinking, and how we play that win-win to get those accounts. Without further ado, let’s go talk to Jonathan.

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Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

I’m so excited to have you on this episode. It’s been a while, but you have this amazing ability, to be able to talk to I will call it the average company and teach them how to out maneuver big competitors on large accounts. Fortune 500 type of accounts. Why don’t you tell everybody what you do now, maybe a little bit of background and set the frame for this whole process?

About Jonathan

I run my own boutique consultancy. It’s the J. Gardner Group. What we do is help people negotiate with confidence and get what they deserve and maybe even more than their fair share out of that, and the reason I feel qualified to offer that service to those that reach out is, I spent many years, leading procurement or sourcing teams at some industry giants, those being General Motors, Dell Computers, Starbucks, and Albertsons. It’s a pretty wide range of industries, and so I have seen thousands of sales pitches from 1,000 companies.

I have personally worked probably 200 to 250 different contracts as an executive. I signed off on several hundred more needed to get to my buying teams. We got average talent at some place, if you got to get them to above average results without your day-to-day involvement. I became very fluent in this, and I’m happy to bring it to the other side of the table because I have seen a lot of opportunities to serve.

I have a question on this just totally off the wall. You and I are buddies here, so, now that you did all that for Starbucks, did they give you free coffee for life?

You have to stay longer. You have to retire to get free coffee from life. We did get a free bag a week and we got a 30% discount in stores and I loved it, but it has since I moved on and I don’t get that 30% discount. I’ve got to say that I’m not as loyal to that brand as I used to be.

It’s like being in the military for twenty years and then you don’t get it until you retire. You have this cool story that we were talking about. What were you telling me about this procurement officer’s position? What was the media thing that you were doing before too?

When I was at Dell, it was interesting. They had a business emergency team. Get people out of the building if it’s on fire. At one point they needed a voice and face to talk to the entire corporation like being on the website and playing the video for what to do when there’s an emergency weather condition. I was the voice and face of emergency weather behavior for all of Dell Corporation for several years. It was a type of thing like if there’s a tornado get in a ditch and if there’s a flood get out of the ditch. If there’s a tornado in a flood, good luck. It was interesting and prior to starting marketing, that was my Andy Warhol fifteen minutes in the spotlight, or so I thought.

Maneuvering Big Competitors

How do we help maneuver big competitors? Let’s say that I’m a company, which I am.  I’m a little guy, some people know me, but most people know me only for industry specific, but I want to now go after a big company like Apple or Dell. A big brand name company. I’m going to walk in there maybe with me and maybe a small team, and now I’m going to go up against these industry giants that have been in that industry forever. How do I maneuver a bigger competitor in that capacity? How was it possible would be my first question and what would be some of the first steps that I’d want to take on?

The good news is that the steps are simple. The challenging part is that it’s difficult to achieve. It takes some real perseverance over time as well as an introspection as a team about who you are as a company and what your company can do. There’s a couple of things. You need to know what problem you are solving, what benefit, or what amazing future you are trying to unlock for that particular customer or prospect, and then you have to take advantage of your size.

You’ve got to be nimble. Don’t go after half of their business for all of North America. You don’t have the scale for that under the conditions you describe, but there’s probably a corner you can take and crush and demonstrate customer intimacy. Knowing them in and out and anticipating their needs that the big bloated competitors are going against, they are not going to be that nimble. Those are the simple concepts that I’d lay out for you and as I promise they are easy to say, probably hard to do but I’d love to unpack that with you if you’d like.

I would love to. There’s so much you gave. I heard you know your abilities, do what you can. Pick the segment of the market that you can do that in and that gets your foot in the door anyways. One of the things that I wanted to dispel the myths of this is a lot of people think, “I can’t do that,” because it’s like, whatever. Even myself I have Intuit. Procter & Gamble, CBS Television, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Nationwide, and other companies.

With Enterprise Rent-A-Car for example, I started with one location. It was because I could talk to them and they could talk to me. This was a telecommunications thing that I did, and they liked the fact that they had local representation. They had somebody that cared versus calling in to a big call center. Eventually that turned into 10 or 20 accounts, New England region, the east coast and then I found myself talking to Saint Louis and their headquarters there about national expansion.

I love the fact that if we know our abilities and do what we can, that’s what I heard and make it value based. I heard you say, “What can you solve for a problem for them? What benefit can you give to them? What amazing future can you give to them?” A lot of people focus in their sales process too much on the oncoming problems. Do you find that the larger accounts, they already know what their problems are? They are not looking for that but they are looking for what could be the problem of the future that can save me from the problems of the future and therefore that’s the opportunity and benefit they can bring.

There’s something in there that we are talking about. When it comes to unlocking a future it’s imagine a situation when or in which you can and maybe that’s you are not chasing your tail instead you are doing something strategic. Maybe it’s something more specific, or a value ad, or you’ve got this product. I’d like that particular approach. The big companies that my big companies have bought from, for whatever reason except for the most sophisticated of their senior execs, they come in with, “We have capabilities.”

Usually, factories, parking lots, people, and equipment. We do these things. We have certain features. They are so focused and this is what a lot of sales teams do. They are so focused on telling what they can do that they forget to understand that this guy or gal that I’m talking to either has a problem that’s a real pain point or there’s something innovative and creative they are trying to unlock in the market where they are consumers or customers of this B2B. I found that you want to aim for that.

There’s a core area in here and you mentioned from when you made a connection with one of the big car rental companies. You saw one problem at one site and then we are able to back leverage your way up to the organization. What I found, and I will give you a bit of insight from my days at Starbucks and then trying to help people understand how to navigate Starbucks, is that you have got the big engine, the retails in the U.S. store.

That’s the holy grail for every supplier. If we get into those 15,000 stores, we are going to be gazillionaires. Maybe. Good luck. However, there’s always or at least back then there was always some innovative thing coming whether it was the reserve store The Roasterie or an evening’s program or maybe Starbucks Canada. That’s dependent on Seattle. For Canadians as opposed to the goods for the Americans but there was always some meaningful niche, but it was a shiny thing and your big giant suppliers, they need to pump out 100 million widgets a week. These niche things, they might only be two widgets per week.

The big guys don’t want them. They are not agile enough. If you are the small guy trying to compete, go after one of those niche areas. Crush it, put more resources on it than you need and that will do a couple things. A) You will do for them what you did, Doug, for the car rental company and you will demonstrate a good name. B) You will learn how to interact with them in a way that does not completely overwhelm your capacity and capabilities.

You won’t get out over your skis financially. You want the $1 billion year deal, but if you get the $1 million year deal, even if you mess it up horribly, you are still in business. You go for the $1 billion year deal and you don’t get it exactly right, you are bankrupt. There’s a whole lot of positive and negative reasons to be very joyful about what you asked and wished for.

We are speaking with Mr. Jonathan Gardner at JGardnerGroup.com is the website. We are talking about how you as a smaller or mid-sized company can go and land your first very large even Fortune 500 or Fortune 50 deal if you’d like. I love what you are saying that you put all your resources into this one point, and you over-service them like they have never been serviced before and that establishes the relationship.

What we gain out of that relationship is potentially a testimonial from a very well known entity. We then can borrow from their social credibility. Not to get political but I saw Taylor Swift endorse Vice President Harris. What impressed me was not that so much, because it’s not political that I’m trying to get into, but that Taylor Swift had like 380 million followers. If I remember correctly that was the number. I was like, “What? 380 million?” That’s a country.

When we get the endorsement or the testimonial from a Taylor Swift or I don’t know an Oprah Winfrey or whoever it is or a Starbucks, that goes a long way for credibility for people to be able to leverage into other things. To get on to shows like this for example. A larger show. “Let me talk about how I landed Starbucks as a client.” That’s a very interesting topic. These topics can be leveraged. It’s not about getting the account. It’s about what else comes with the account there.

I have a friend who’s a consultant and he once told me this story. This company was a $100 million company and they were like, “How do we know that you are good enough for us?” That was their question and he said well, “If I’m good enough for 3M, Merck, Mercedes-Benz, American Express,” and he named two other companies like Starbucks and Dell. “If I was good enough for them. I will probably be good enough for you. What do you think?”

That changed the whole focus of the conversation. That’s one reason that I’m bringing forth, because sometimes people might be sitting and they go, “It sound like a lot of work to go get a small little piece of a company,” but the reality is that when you can say that you worked for these certain companies, your status immediately goes up.

The exact same dynamic will occur within a company. I gave the example of Starbucks. There’s retail, the big engine, and then all these little innovation shoot offs that are interesting. If you are trying to sell into food or beverage or something like that, go from one of the innovation shoot offs. To tie this exactly to what you said, it’s not the same as getting Taylor Swift to endorse you, but what you have is the procurement manager or buyer or whoever the decision maker is on that little piece of business becomes your Taylor Swift inside the company. That’s the fact of matter.

Something else to help all the readers understand the psychology and dynamics in there. The big engine is going to get all the resources. Let’s say there’s a procurement team of 100. 97 of them are going to be working on the big engine and then there’s going to be like 3 to work on everything else, and the 3 don’t have time. They need a concierge and white glove, pick your metaphor. They need a differentiated level of service and they are overworked and overstressed. They don’t have time.

They are not getting support from quality assurance, R&D, or marketing. Category brand management cares, but doesn’t. That smaller entity is going to be way more open to taking risks to solving their problem. Coming back to the Taylor Swift metaphor thing for a second. Once you delight that individual that owns the small shiny object not the big engine, then you have an internal advocate that says, “I worked with Doug. He’s good. By the way, you are set up to transact meaning, you have already been vetted as a ‘supplier.’ Money is flowing to you.”

Then the big engine, you have taken all of the bureaucratic barriers to entryway like, “You don’t have a contract with you,” and all those things. Which are true. They are small obstacles, but they can get in the way and create noise. Just by getting some dollars moving on the small thing, you have created a Taylor Swift within that big account.

That is gold because, folks, if you didn’t catch this, you now have an internal advocate inside a company. I want to reinforce that by my friend with a $100 million company. Use the bigger names to give credibility and alleviate some of the fear for the $100 million company. He did this within Merck and he ended up going from department to department to division to division. He told me at one point as a consultant, he made $3 million just within Merck over the years.

I’m so grateful you brought this up because most people don’t think of “I get this one piece and then I can expand within the company” or these people move from one company to another company, and then all the sudden it’s like they go from Dell to Microsoft or whatever. All of the sudden now you’ve got an opportunity because you have that relationship of trust that’s been built in this other entity.

This is how we move from entity to entity. You played in that space. When you were at Starbucks and other places, you probably went to conferences I’m assuming and met other people from very large companies and had relationships. If somebody services your accounts extremely well and you like them and have them as a trusted entity, they reach out and say, “I was wondering if you knew any other people that were in this category.” You may have thrown a referral here and there.

That is part of the game. Procurement people like finance and sales move from company to company in search of opportunities. A lot of procurement truly is transferable. The bottom line is you end up this cross-pollination to dredge up that old term but you get people that they move around the business. As you move up in organizations like to the level where I was trusted to contribute, there may only be 1,000 people in the U.S. that could effectively run a big procurement team.

A lot of procurement is transferable. Share on X

That’s not the right number but it’s close. And do I know all 1,000? No, but I probably know 200 of them and then they all know the rest. That works exceptionally well and you get into the network. There is one other point about why you want to go for the niche product if I can go back for a second. Margin. What I mean by that is if I stay at my former employer Starbucks. If you are selling into the big engine US retail is a mainstream product. I mentioned before of the 100 heads, 97 focused on that.

Even if you are selling a food or beverage product, you might have one or two people, plus some finance support, a database, and a math wizard in the background. Focus on your product. They are going to take your cost bill of material. A spreadsheet with line items for the components of your thing. Put in their database, cross compare or compare to inflation. They are going to rip that apart and negotiate with you, on every single line item with a comparison to market and some fictional should cost or clean sheets if you like that one.

However, if you are over in the niche space, you have one guy or gal who’s got a 30 hour per day job. They are overwhelmed. They need a concierge. They need the fire put out. They need the amazing future unlocked now. Speed and quality are it. They don’t have time to do the spreadsheet analysis. They don’t have the tools supporting them because they are operating in a snowflake and a one-off environment. Back to margin. You can make more money on that product on a per unit basis, then on the other one. Get the high margin before you go for the low margin.

That is such wise advice. I had a very good friend and he had a lobster wholesale business. He was servicing supermarkets, and then the local Walmart called him. They said, “We’d like you to put your lobsters in Walmart.”

They put him out of business.

He was smart enough. He said, “How many locations?” They said, “We’d like you to serve all of New England.” He said, “No.” and I asked him, “Why’d you turn down Walmart?” He goes, “If they held me up on payment for 90 days, I’d be out of business because I’m putting so much money out.” To your point you can get hurt if things don’t go as they are supposed to, but if you are in on that smaller thing and everything is established and you know how they are paying, then you have got to expand out.

You could go get funding for that expansion. You can go to a bank for example and say, “I have this account with Starbucks and we are expanding, and I need some expansion capital.” A lot of banks will look at that in a friendly way. Especially if you have a contract or term sheet or something in hand. It is very smart advice that you gave people and I hope that you all take that advice.

I want to go back to Taylor Swift for a second, a little funny story. I find it funny. When Taylor Swift was first coming out, both my daughters were very much into her music, but they were very young. We lived in Texas at the time and Taylor Swift was coming to the Houston area. I decided, I will buy tickets for Taylor Swift. I didn’t even know who she was but I knew they liked her.

I went to the Taylor Swift concert with my two daughters. Amazing social media. She was the best. I don’t know who did her social media back then but it was being done exactly like live capturing emails and everything at the event. Kudos to you, Taylor, and your people. But when I was there, I swear, out of the 40,000 people that were there, I was 1 of 7 men in that audience. I remember looking across the arena and I saw another guy, and he saw me and we waved to each other. It was like we were overrun.

Everyone else came about mid-chest on him because they were all nine years old.

Yeah, and all the moms were bringing the kids and I was like, “This is so funny.” The Taylor Swift analogy that you are bringing within the company is so important. I wanted to bring this up too with RFPs. In our auditing and consulting business that we had in the telecommunications space, I used to get our RFPs but people would be sending them to me like, “I would do us a city or town,” and then somehow the Taylor Swift within got me on a list.

I got 4 or 5 of these RFPs in, but I didn’t do too many of them because they were a lot of time and a lot of wasted effort. I found out unless you have a Taylor Swift within at that point and this was me back then, it was like you got thrown into the generic category, but I know you have some experience with this on the RFP side. What do you do if they go to an RFP and they are like, “I’m going to request for proposal folks or request for a bid”? What do you do as that entity at that point? How do you handle that situation?

RFP

It depends on what your relationship with the company is at that point in time. Let’s start with you are not doing business with them and one comes in. If I’m head of sales, “Doug sent me an RFP.” Who’s Doug? Does Doug know who I am or did Doug’s team do some Google searching and find out about Jonathan and therefore let’s send him an RFP?

Reigning that back in, you want to find out what it’s all about. See if it’s possible to establish a relationship. Before you attack like the rest of your team, operations, planning, procurement, and finance. Before you attack all in to put your heart and soul in it, find out if it’s real or are they using you as a rabbit that the dogs are going to chase around the track.

Are you the low ball that they are hoping shakes up their dynamic with no chance of you winning business? If you can ferret that out, it might take you a few hours to research you as a salesperson, but you save your company 1,000 hours at least. More importantly, that you are a salesperson, you preserve your own political capital within the company so that when you need something that’s real, people are going to give it to you as opposed to ignoring your email. That’s if you are not doing business and have no relationship.

Let’s go all the way to the other extreme and let’s say that you are the incumbent. You are serving a big huge chunk like retail stores. You’ve got the big gorilla. Then you need to leverage your power map or all the different people, the little mini Taylor Swifts, R&D, and planting. Not just you but your technical account manager or your head of QA, or whoever on your team is networked in. You need to find out what’s going on.

You also need to know yourself. You need to know your competition. All of that is to help you understand what your bargaining power is, what your appetite for risk is, and then you get into the old negotiation terms like BATNA or ZOPA, Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement or the Zone Of Possible Agreement. You need to figure all that out.

You need to know yourself and your competition to help you understand what your bargaining power really is. Share on X

When you go into the negotiation, you are solid as a team and you know how you want to play, and you may have to drop the price to preserve business, but there are a lot of other things you can do. With those two extremes, no relationship and a lot to lose, there are a lot of places in the middle but let me pause, and let you take it to where you think that the readers will be most interested.

What came to my head was, “This guy knows his process,” like the back of your hands. If I’m in this RFP situation, I’d like to call you. That’s what I would do.

Please. That’s what I’m here for.

I know from doing this before, we didn’t spend thousands of hours, but we spent dozens or 100 hours, because we were a smaller company when we were getting them. I know that we were able to get some accounts. When I looked at the time invested and the return on the RFP process, it wasn’t worth it for us. I also know people who do RFPs very successfully.

What I’m hearing from you is they can be done successfully if you know how to do the pathway and how to negotiate through the Quagmire of all of the acronyms and processes that go on. I would say to people, “If you have these questions, reach out to you,” in that capacity because you are going to be able to shortcut that in a very quick way.

Frankly, making mistakes doing RFPs is costly because it’s costly in time, energy, and lost opportunity for going after other business. Like you were saying, “How do you mean your Blue Ocean within the Blue Ocean for these other larger accounts?” We all have limited resources to some capacity. To me, leverage a guy like yourself who’s been there, knows it and could probably tell me and an hour or so what I would take 40 to try to figure out.

To the point, once you fare it all this out and flush all this out – I’m hearing objectively not subjectively, but objectively we want to look at the data and what we are looking for and say, “Yes or no.” We don’t want to crank out our RFPs because we are going to burn resources within our company in other things and it’s almost like I don’t know, I put out twenty RFPs. I don’t get anything and then I go to the people again and they are like, “This, Doug.”

He asked me to work on Friday afternoon after 3:00 PM. Once again.

That makes total sense.

Rapid points. If you are an incumbent and you wait for the RFP to try to establish that power map, you waited too long. The same way that is if you wait until you get sued to talk to your lawyer. You waited too long. If you’ve got a pricing your business case dilemma, and you don’t get to your local head of finance like you don’t bring in finance, it’s too late.

If you are an incumbent and you wait for the RFP to try to establish that power map, you waited too long. Share on X

You have to establish those multiple points of connection early so that you can find things out and here’s why. Procurement if they are doing a big transformation or a call saving sprint with one of the big Mick Consultancies that are out there and they are very famous and active in this space. They are going to very effectively silence all communication except from procurement with that supply base once the RFP has commenced, so you are not going to get anywhere with anyone else.

You need a priest in a lawyer to absolve you of your sins and get out of jail because it’s too late. That’s one particular element of it. The other that I will mention and this is objectively, “What do we need in a business,” volumes, cost margin, lead times, MOQs. There is business that you don’t want. If that customer is trying to reduce this conversation to a dollar for widgets and sometimes that’s all it is, but often that’s what they want to make you think. If they reduce it to dollars for widgets then you’ve got to ask yourself, “That’s what procurement says. That’s what this RFP is all about.”

If we are giving them ten more flavors of support that tax all these other teams and they drive us down to a pure tactical transaction, at what point do we want to walk away or do we have to withdraw that support, or make them think we will if they persist? There are a lot of different little angles in there, and I’d be thrilled if some of the readers, if they need help, reach out. 

I feel like you have a PhD in this topic but those are the two other little angles I wanted to introduce on this episode.

I love the fact that you are talking about what I call win-win, because if it’s not win on both sides, we should be the first to disengage because that’s intelligent on our side. You are looking at this from a profitability standpoint. There’s always maybe a shade of whatever here and there that we want to say, “We will go a little bit more on the purple shade.”

Maybe it is Starbucks and it’s like, “We want the name or whatever,” but that’s a business case that has to be made. Most people in sales don’t do this. They are out there and they are like, “I will take this. I will take that.” I will tell you folks what Jonathan says is so important and you know from reading here that I’m constantly on you about running your business by the numbers.

One time I had 370 clients in the business we had at the time and I ran all the numbers and I found out that 85% of our clients were not even making money. What the heck are we doing? We would spin the wheels and I was like, “Why is this?” This was early on. I was a young guy and I ran the numbers and I’m like, “No wonder we can’t buy this. No wonder we can’t get this traction, because out of 85% of the business was breaking even or lost. That 80/20 rule, that 20% of the business produces 80% of the money. I was in that situation. What we did is we ended up renegotiating new agreements with the existing 85% and we lost quite a bit of them, but it made the company profitable at that point.

I love the story and I did work with a client. They were a food and beverage business broadly and we started on a SKU rationalization project or item rationalization. 80/20 which ones are profitable which aren’t. We came out with words like power skews, the redundant skews, the zombies, and the tickets to entry. If you do all that analysis, and 80% of them aren’t pulling their weight – the same thing is true with customers.

In that particular situation, I brought some of my tech partners, wizards that know how to type in Python and do all this cool coding. We accelerated and automated that analysis under the dimensions that were important. We showed them and this was a medium sized $500 million company and they had some big boys they were selling into like McDonald’s and Dunkin and on and on. It turns out all the big sexy names were at zero gross margin. In some cases, almost all of them were pulling SKUs that had zero gross margin.

The dynamic became, “Now that we have done this product and customer segmentation, what do we do about it?” The SKUs that are dogs and the customers that are important give them a choice. Prices are doubled or working on a transition out. The ones at the top, you probably don’t want to touch those but the ones in the middle are where we had a ton of fun.

To zip through to the conclusion of that particular process an outcome – the client recognized that they didn’t have the bargaining power to negotiate a different outcome with the big sexy unprofitable names. However, one of their other customers did and that other customer said, “We will acquire that whole bucket of unprofitable business because it’s more revenue. We know how to make that profitable. We will be leveraging our systems and whatnot.”

Instead of having to negotiate with every single one of their top fifteen accounts that were all on profitable, they were able to sell it and they got the albatross off their neck. It’s like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner came true down in Houston, Texas. They shed the albatross. That freed them up tremendously from the amount of time they were sinking into making no money. It hurts. I’m thrilled for him. You wouldn’t expect to go there, and if you take a, “I’m a sales guy. I’m emotional because I landed the big fish.” You won’t get there, but if you chill out, you take an enterprise or portfolio approach, you can have a lot more fun and make a good living in the process.

I wish I knew you when I was 23 and this happened in our company because I didn’t even think I could sell the accounts off back then. I would know a little more. The thing is those of you are selling with landing the big fish, remember if your fish ends up on the beach and can’t breathe, that fish dragged you up on the beach with it.

You want to always look at this in the terms because business is simple. Money out, money in equals something and that equals something you want in the positive column. I wouldn’t want to be the sales rep that brought a bunch of bigger names into the company and found out where we are losing $30 million or something on those names.

It’s not good. Let me, Doug, in your series, do you talk about bargaining power and leverage and how to figure out what you have? How to build it? How to exaggerate it? Have you all covered that pretty well over the years?

Through different episodes and things we have. We are always looking at, it’s not about sales, it’s about revenue growth, but it’s got to be about profitable revenue growth. We get into some of those. I’d have to look back to be quite frank to see whether we did one specifically. When you do so many episodes you can only remember so many.

Can I throw a vignette that’s tied to the RFP process?

Sure.

I had a client. They were getting RFP. They were terrified of the big account. They built a factory to service the account. Got everybody together. We did the math. We built a story and so people calmed down and we had a play to run through the negotiation process, but this link to bargaining power. My question to them was, “Who are your competitors,” and it doesn’t even matter who they were. “Can they make what you can make?”

One by one we went through and they were like ten of them that could play. This is a bakery, but nobody could effectively produce the key product. It would take at least 15 months, probably 18 months for somebody else to put in the lines to do the qualification to figure out the couple of bits of secret sauce and then scale the volumes.

It’s like, “If you said adios, we are out of here big customers.” They would have a hole in their product portfolio for fifteen months. First, the client was, “We are not going to do that.” Chill out. We are not going to do it. We are going to talk about the option of what would have to be true for your customer to replace you so that we can help you understand what your real bargaining power was.

Once we all got our heads around that, they could replace us in eighteen months. Maybe twelve if everything went well for me. We are not negotiating for our margin forever. We are negotiating for their margin on our product and what would happen in a twelve month period and how difficult it would be for that procurement manager to represent internally that, “I thought I was going to squeeze a nickel. It turns out we don’t have any more $5 bank products to sell. Sorry guys.” They can’t do that. Procurement gets fired in that scenario.

If we had it walk through the, “How do we build a power map? What’s our competition?” If we push the nuclear button what happens? Not to us, but what happens to them? If you don’t do that scenario planning, you find yourself in an emotional amygdala. “I’ve got to save the big account,” and maybe they might need to save you.

Win-Win

It shifts the whole balance of power. If an airline was grounded for six months, they are pretty much in deep trouble, if not out at that point. That happened to TWA way back then. It was in a movie that I saw and I was like, “How did they survive this?” They almost didn’t. They snapped back but that is a very good point that we don’t sometimes understand the value that we bring to the particular company. We are so, “We’ve got to keep this,” but it’s not a win-win relationship. They are winning. We are losing and it’s not a healthy relationship.

How do you make it healthy? You find out your significant value. In that case, they needed you or that company because if they went away for eighteen months they had nothing else. That rebalances the scales to be able to go back and have a reasonable conversation not strong-arming them but a reasonable conversation to be able to say, “We want to work and play win-win.” Where were you when I was 23?

I was 23. In that particular dynamic I described, it was a privately held company. They were on a roll-up strategy snapping up different things. The CEO of the portfolio came in that the key operating partner from the PE firm came in and they were able to help the business unit CFO. The business unit head of sales realized, “If they can’t disengage for at least twelve months, if we have got that much of a runway than some of the other acquisitions were thinking about or the client acquisition strategies or products we are looking to acquire, in that amount of time we can replace them.”

Sales team, don’t worry about the line now that you have discovered this. We have got things we can’t talk about that will help. We know that you now know that you have got eighteen months to fill the business. Go get a margin which is different then do whatever it takes to get a yes out of them. Very different.

Resources

I could talk to you all day about these things. If somebody wants to get a hold of you, they are like, “This is a smart guy. I would like to talk to him.” What is the best way to get a hold of you or reach out to you or learn more?

My website is JGardnerGroup.com. My email is Jonathan@JGardnerGroup.com. I’m on LinkedIn. You can find me. It’d be a real pleasure because I enjoy this. Among other things, I took margin from smaller companies for many years, and now I’m trying to redeem myself and get myself out of purgatory by helping medium and smaller companies carve some margin back. Think of this as is you will be helping my soul by letting me help you.

Thanks so much for being here and playing full out. I’m very grateful and, again folks, this is Jonathon Gardner with JGardnerGroup.com. Reach out to him at Jonathan@JGardnerGroup.com or his LinkedIn and we will go from there, so, thanks again, Jonathan.

Thank you, Doug.

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Claiming your white space if you will. What’s that space that is untapped but that you can fulfill that Blue Ocean within the Blue Ocean if you will, that you can fulfill that the buyer is going, “I need that.” The apex decision makers going, “That is great,” and we can fulfill that and that you have your own space within that major corporation.

It works great to do that and you want to be able to talk about not just problems, because people know they have the problems. What are the amazing future opportunities that you can create through either heading off a future problem that they don’t even know they have or innovating and creating that new thing that they are going to run into but they don’t know they are going to run into but you can solve that issue for them?

There are so many things about going after the larger accounts, but as Jonathan said, “Keep it simple.” There’s a step by step simplicity process to this. If you can keep that simple, then what will happen is you will be able to manage that process. If it’s not win-win, don’t do the business. Why? It’s because you are going to suffer the consequences of that process.

When you are selling at a loss, unless it’s strategic and you like, “I know why I’m selling at a loss.” That’s strategic. It takes multiple accounts to make up and break even. In other words, if you sell it at a loss depending on the loss, you might have to sell ten accounts to get back the loss. Never mind making a profit. You’re standing on a treadmill running in place at that point.

I have done it and I know lots of other people have done it. I’m bringing this forth so you don’t do it too. If you are interested in raising your sales, maybe you are even interested in doubling your sales revenue, reach out to us. We are happy to help you there. It’s at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. I thank you for reading this episode. If you found it helpful, please leave it a favorable review. It takes a couple minutes to do it and I’m forever grateful that you are doing it. For those of you who have done so, thank you.

Go out and sell something and sell it profitably. Help somebody resolve a challenge, gain a better future opportunity and make their day happier. This is a noble thing to do because a lot of people have stress in their day and you as the person who can help them reduce some of that stress through your expertise and allowing them to procure or invest in what you have. As long as it’s great for them and great to you, you are doing them a great service. Go out and sell it. Sell it properly. Watch your discounting as we talked about and until next time, I wish you the greatest success. To your success.

Important Links

• Jonathan Gardner
• Jonathan@JGardnerGroup.com
• LinkedIn – Jonathan Gardner
• YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com