“Peter is a good boss.” She immediately stated.
“Ah. Glad to hear it. What makes him so good?”
“He stands up for his people.”
“Give us an example.”
“I had a difficult price discussion with a customer, who wanted a really big discount on his maintenance contract and I could not and would not give it to him.”
“Why did he want that discount?”
“Well, he said that our prices are organized crime, we hijack our customers, and that maintenance costs must actually be zero.”
“Well, I understand where that perception comes from. You are the only ones that support the hardware, he can not do without maintenance, and so he is at the mercy of your pricing.”
“Well, the man called Peter and he said he wanted another account manager. I was not doing my job properly.” “Oops. You were suddenly the cause of his problem.” “Yep.” “And what did Peter do?”
“Peter and I invited him to lunch.” “Peter played mediator. Beautiful.” “He did a lot more than that.”
“I’m curious.”
“He explained that I carried out his orders perfectly, and that he was not going to put in place a different account manager for that customer.”
“That customer was probably quite embarrassed when you sat there.”
“He looked crestfallen.”
“And then?”
“And then Peter made a masterstroke. He said, “Actually, we’re not here to quarrel, but to solve your problem with our price.”
The customer replied eagerly. “I have the strong feeling that you are abusing your monopoly position and you are squeezing us like lemons.”
“We’re very sorry if you have that feeling,” commented Peter very empathetically.
“Yes, you’re right. We are real money grabbers.”
He laughed at the terrifed face of the customer.
“What solution would you like,” asked Peter suddenly.
“Reduce maintenance cost by 50%, Peter. That seems a minimum requirement.”
“We were just announcing a price increase of 3%, index adjustments and so on.”
“This is leading us nowhere.”
“Do you know why our maintenance costs so high?”
“Because you are so expensive.”
“No, not really. You have too many older machines. There is a very good way to bring down your maintenance costs and infrastructure costs.”
“I’m listening.”
“What if you could consolidate and virtualize your servers, then your absolute and relative costs would go down very much. The new hardware is much cheaper, and maintenance will follow that price.”
“What savings would that yield?”
“We need to do the accounting exercise with the write offs but I am sure that you can save between 30 and 40 per cent per year.”
“What I found so clever about Peter’s approach is that he defended me, listening to the client, that he found a solution to the problem, and that he closed a new hardware contract. I learned a lot during that lunch. You should also learn from your boss. If a boss doesn’t teach you new things, he is worthless.”
For more Valueselling.be stories, see Jan, Flamend, Keep your calm and sell your socks off. De Cavalerie, 2013
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