Tired of being the bug?
Ready to be the windshield?

We help B2B selling teams win the negotiation game!

Poor negotiation is the root cause of most sales challenges. Today’s B2B sellers must negotiate for everything - time, access, information, resources, and commercial value.

Leading Sales provides a negotiation system that will give your team the skills, process, tools, and mindset required to negotiate a better outcome in every customer interaction.

THE NEGOTIATION GAME

Buyers are playing a negotiation long game starting at the first meeting and continuing throughout the entire sales process.  

They are mounting an organized attack based on a proven playbook:

  • Controlling the process

  • Withholding information

  • Blocking access

  • Ignoring timelines

  • Obfuscating the facts

  • Commoditizing value

  • Mind-games

  • Outright bullying

COST OF LOSING

50%

Sellers are losing ground in every interaction, which can add up to 50% over the customer's lifetime.  Each little bit of ground lost contributes significantly to common sales challenges:

  • Unqualified opportunities

  • Stalled sales processes

  • Competitive losses

  • Commoditized value

  • Unrealistic contract terms

  • Unsustainable discount levels

  • Reduced footprint and downsells

WINNING THE GAME

Selling teams have huge advantages but do not appreciate their position, or understand how to leverage it. With the right mindset and playbook, the losing trend can be reversed. 

Teams that know and act on the following tenets see radical improvement in their outcomes:

  • Sellers must realize they are always in a negotiation game, and play accordingly.

  • There are common ploys that buyers use repeatedly. Recognizing and responding appropriately quickly mitigates their impact.

  • It is a long game.  Negotiation ground is won or lost in every interaction. 

  • Small wins accrue significantly and enable long-term strategies to be highly effective.

  • Sellers must plan and execute as a team.  Individual expertise is critical, but winning the long game requires an aligned team effort.

By applying a playbook that responds to buyer tactics and delivers repeated wins, a selling team can leverage each one into a highly successful long-term negotiation strategy.

THE NEGOTIATION SYSTEM

Based on 30 years of enterprise selling experience, Leading Sales has identified four critical factors required to navigate today’s B2B negotiation world successfully. These components have been integrated into a proven system that can be quickly deployed and adopted by all roles in the revenue organization.

  • Mastering a core set of negotiation competencies, which delivers improved outcomes in every customer interaction.

  • Deploying a sales process that tightly couples gives and gets between both parties improves all aspects of sales execution.

  • Identifying, communicating, and proving a value proposition that carves out a unique category for the selling team.

  • Aligning the team around a set of proven plays that provide a roadmap to respond to the most frequent tactics they will encounter.

Many leaders think of negotiation primarily as competency. Skills are critical, but without the right context, their impact is severely limited. And with the right context, skill mastery can be accelerated. Leading Sales has designed the negotiation system to encompass everything required to ensure maximum results.

  • Mindset: The confidence and emotional balance required to manage successful outcomes in all scenarios.

  • Competency: Learning and practice to enable mastery of comprehensive negotiation skills

  • Coaching: Managers aligned and enabled to provide supportive mentoring.

  • Complementary roles: All customer-facing team members are aligned and executing together.

  • Blueprint: Clear guidelines for demands & concessions including goals, walk-away & non-negotiables, acceptable compromises & counters.

  • Value factors: Anchors to establish unique value, with strategies to communicate and leverage.

LEADING SALES APPROACH

Leading Sales deploys the system in a fast-paced, high-impact 90-day program.

2 Teams

The revenue organization is structured into 2 cohorts that run in parallel. The Execution team consists of the sellers who will be leading conversations with customers on a daily basis. The Strategy team is the managers, ops, support, enablement, and senior leaders that will define the customized process, guidelines, and best practices that are deployed by the execution team.

12 Weeks

The program consists of 12 modules, each including competencies, playbooks, and tools. There are actionable learnings from day one that can be immediately applied to improve outcomes at any point in the sales process.   The skills and knowledge build across the program, culminating in a go-to-market team that can cohesively run effective negotiation plays.

90 Minutes

Participants invest 90 minutes weekly in fast-moving sessions to learn, practice, and apply the principles and new plays. As a result, they quickly see a change in their negotiation outcomes.  By the end of the 12 weeks, the entire customer-facing organization will have acquired new skills, developed key processes, practiced team plays, defined new protocols and guidelines, and deployed planning tools.

Results are immediate and accrue across the entire program!

VALUE OF WINNING

100%

The four components of the Negotiation System create value individually. When stacked together their value is amplified and can double the revenue of a typical seller in 24-36 months.

  • 25% - Negotiation Expertise

  • 25% - Give-Get Sales Process

  • 25% - Unique Value

  • 25% - Success Playbook

WHY LEADING SALES

OUR STORY

We developed the Negotiation System in the real world while scaling an early-stage SaaS company and creating a new category. In that market, it quickly became clear that everything had to be negotiated - sponsorship, budget, IT approval, year 1 contract and commercials, implementation resources, system deployment, user adoption, expansion opportunities, upsells, renewals, references, and marketing support.

To address this reality, we brought together learnings from years of enterprise selling experience and built it into a methodology that could be adopted effectively.

As a result, we saw a wholesale transformation of outcomes at all stages of the sales process and customer lifecycle. The numbers confirmed it - revenue grew 20X, and landing ARR increased from $50 to $250K.

We know we’re not the only revenue organization facing this challenge. Based on many conversations and our experience in diverse markets, we are confident that nearly 100% of B2B selling teams will find immense value in this approach. So we have taken the underlying principles and methodology, coupled them with our impatience for results, and built it into the high-impact, fast time-to-value Negotiation System.

ABOUT

Leading Sales is led by Brian McDowell, who has a unique perspective based on 15 years as an operational sales leader, and 15 years as a management consultant focused on sales strategy and effectiveness. His most recent role was the CRO at Firstup, where he scaled the organization from $5M to $100M, and grew the team from 12 to 120.

By the numbers, he has personally directed $1B in transactions and trained & coached $100B while serving 100 clients and 50,000 sales professionals.

Want to learn more?

Tired of being the bug? Ready to be the windshield, reverse the losing trend, and set your team up to win the negotiation game?

Request a quick 30-minute call to understand if the system is a fit and ensure there is clear ROI and business reason to invest.

We will share:

  • Details about the program

  • Deployment strategies

  • Critical success factors

  • Investment

  • Expected results

We ask that you share:

  • Top challenges

  • Market position & win rate

  • Goals & ambitions

  • Team parameters - reps, quotas, ACV

We don’t waste time - all it takes is a quick call, and you will know if there is hope for your team to escape the negotiation bug!