Your Personal Strategy

To work out your own strategy and win the deal despite the buyer’s pressure, you must do the following:

• Identify those players whom you can help to modify their objectives. For example, the buyer may realize that the important thing for her is not to obtain a good deal up front. Instead, she will add more value if she establishes a framework agreement covering several sites. She will thereby save on certifications, tests, spare parts, after-sales service, and so on. She will also obtain high-volume discounts.
• Identify those players whose resources you can exploit or change. For example, the quality director may become a firm ally if you can help her to develop provisional packaging procedures applicable to all sites based on your technical solutions. It is essential that you exploit the fact that she has the ear of the plant manager.
• Identify those players whose constraints you can exploit or change. For example,
  • by applying fierce pressure on your competitors’ constraints (calibration speed for Manuland, reliability tests for Killer plc), you could propose special tests to address certain issues;
  • by training the buyer in existing technical solutions, thereby giving her the option of challenging the “techies”;
  • by helping the logistics manager build a consensus on the selection of a high-performance solution that has been tried and tested within the group.

You can then influence the strategies of particular players and achieve your own objectives. To set your ideas down clearly on paper—and preferably working as a team—draw up a “resources matrix” (see Table 10.1).