Six Essential Rules of Sales Negotiation, with Mike Schultz [Episode 786]

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Mike Schultz is the President of the RAIN Group.

In this episode, we talk about the new report RAIN Group published on B2B sales negotiations titled, “Top Performance in Sales Negotiations: Surprising Research on Tactics Sellers and Buyers Use, What Works, and What Doesn’t.”

Mike and I dig into why good business deals are as much about good selling as they are good negotiation.

We then get into RAIN’s Six Essential Rules of Sales negotiation, what Mike’s team found was the most effective sales negotiation tactic, and why that tactic is rarely seen by buyers.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul: Mike Schultz. Welcome back to the show.

Mike Schultz: Well, thanks so much for having me, Andy. Yeah.

Andy Paul: Always a pleasure to talk with you, but you’re joining us from Boston today and you’re a big Red Sox fan. You gonna miss the start of the season?

Mike Schultz: Yeah, I’m going to miss the start of the season. I’m an even bigger, even bigger self expands. So I’m, I’m missing the continuation of the season there. What about yourself?

Andy Paul: Soccer. Big soccer fan, but with the connection to Boston, because my team is Liverpool and they’re owned by the Fenway Sports Group.

Mike Schultz: Oh, there you go.

Andy Paul: So yeah. Big, big hole in my early Saturday mornings without being able to turn on a premier league game.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, you said, I think you’re in Boston and I think I’m in Boston too. I haven’t left my house in about a month, so maybe I’m in Boston. Maybe I’m in Oz. It’s really hard to know.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Yeah, no, it’s, we’ve gone. I think our record is, have gone two weeks without leaving the house, but at some point we just had to get out and take a walk

Mike Schultz: Yeah.

Andy Paul: Fully protected though.

Mike Schultz: Is that because the paparazzi are so busy at your front door, that you can’t be bothered with them and all their other questions and photo snapping.

Andy Paul: Yeah. You know, people are just obsessed with what happens in sales.

Mike Schultz: Yeah. Well, I thought it was just how good looking you were, but I guess it’s the whole expertise thing.

Andy Paul: So, um, yeah, we’re going to chat today about a research report that your firm put out recently called Top Performance in Sales Negotiations: Surprising Research on Tactics, Sellers, and Buyers use what works and what doesn’t. So sort of overall question is, is more philosophical. Is. If you could, should salespeople even be involved in negotiating?

I mean, if you could set it up such that the sales was not involved in negotiations, all they had to do was get it to that point where it enters negotiations. Would that be desirable?

Mike Schultz: Yeah, that’s almost like saying should basketball players be involved in defense and should baseball players be involved in base running? I don’t know if there’s necessarily a way to separate it because not only do you have negotiation as often, even an explicit part of the sales process outlined by a company.

Uh, you have the value proposition case that you’re making. And I don’t mean from a marketing perspective or an elevator pitch. I mean, the process you go through, whether it’s in two meetings or a year and a half to make sure that you have the conditions set to be the most valuable offering to buyers.

So essentially you are preparing for a negotiation the whole time because you’re setting the, you know, you’re setting the conditions on the field for the end of the sales process. So you’re, you’re both doing negotiation the whole time, and then you are explicitly involved in a negotiation. And I think, you know, to your point is, is, is it really the right thing for sellers to be in negotiation?

Uh, in some ways sellers don’t don’t have a choice because they can’t go through a whole process and then turn it off to sell over to someone else and say, “Hey, I know that we have a $1.5 million deal and we are up against one of our toughest competitors, but I just don’t want to personally be involved in this right now. Can you talk to Steve and my finance department about that? That’s just not going to go well. So I don’t know if there is a way to divorce sellers from negotiation itself. And in some ways it leads us into the discussion of the report. It’s, you know, you have no choice. So you might as well make this a part of your expertise set and skill set, so you can succeed with it as much as possible.

Andy Paul: Well, I think one of the key points you brought up and certainly for me is that integrated, you integrate negotiating throughout your selling process is how you package the deal is in effect. Part of the negotiation, how you package your offers is an effect part of the negotiations. I mean, ideally you want to get to the point where, where if it gets handed off to procurement, that your deal is structured in such a way, your offer structured in such a way that procurement really can’t do much with it.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, I mean, there, you can start a conversation about procurement and in fact, uh, we might, we may just do that, but there’s so much pent up into everything that you, just, everything that you just said. I mean, if you think about. The buyer’s perspective. Let’s say it’s a huge purchase for a company. And an executive vice president is leading the charge for this huge purpose, a huge purchase and the company’s good size.

And he present to the CEO and the board, why he’s doing this. He only needs to cover the answers to four questions. Which is why act, why am I doing this? Why now? Why are we doing this today versus something else? Uh, why am I doing it with a certain provider? So from the provider’s perspective, it could be why us, and then why do I trust this actually going to work?

So to the extent that a seller can make sure that they answer, that they transfer from their head into the buyers, had the answers to why, why now? Why us and why trust. You’re going to win the sale. So why act and why now are really strong it’s we should do this because the ROI case is compelling. And then if we’re going to do it, it’s why us, why trust?

Why am I going to use one provider over another or one approach over another? And then why trust? Sometimes the ROI case is great, but buyer’s been sold in ROI case for a long, long time. And many buyers are burned when it literally just doesn’t materialize. So it’s not just about the ROI case. It’s about the expectation that is going to come to fruition.

But again, if they can answer, why, why, why now? Why us, why trust then you are in the position where the buyer is absolutely going to do it. And then the why S why trust? It’s the alternatives are not as good, so we don’t have the leverage that we would have from the buyer’s perspective to go hammer them on price, for example.

So. Um, you’re, you’re leading, you’re leading up to this the whole time. Uh, and then when it comes to purchasing, I’ll just, I’ll just make a point. One of the things that we found with purchasing is that the business buyers, you, you would think that the business buyers and purchasing, Oh, they’re part of the same company.

They’re fine. Oh, wow. The stories that they told of how much they absolutely can’t stand about working with each other are hilarious. So.

Andy Paul: You’re talking about, you don’t know what the economic buyer with versus procurement, right? That there’s this internal clash.

Mike Schultz: Uh, yeah, so the economic buyer, I don’t like that term by the way. I think that it’s unhelpful and misleading in terms of, uh, the, the decision rules that buyers have. But yeah, the, the person that does that is, uh, the business buyer. So to speak person that is looking for an ROI who may or may not control the purse strings.

Andy Paul: owns the owns the problem and the solution.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, the one that owns the problem and the solution, literally can’t stand working with purchasing sometimes and vice versa. And one of the things that we found about purchasing is we ask purchasing a ton of questions about what it is that they’re trying to, to find out what it is that they’re trying to do, what their goals are and what they’re trying to achieve and, uh, what their metrics were.

And literally. They didn’t disagree. They didn’t agree with themselves. So they were constantly asking for, we said, what’s the one thing sellers can do to be better with you in the process. And they literally from purchasing person to purchasing person we’re diametrically opposed. So what’s the seller to do so to speak, but it certainly makes, makes it interesting.

And it certainly makes it not easy for a seller to figure out what does procurement want? Cause that’s like lumping them all together. I was like, what do buyers want? Well, if you do that, but you have 10 sales, 10 opportunities in your pipeline, and they’re important. You should find out what each individual buyer wants, because they probably don’t look the same.

We’re just finding the exact same thing with procurement.

Andy Paul: Yeah, but you have two interesting points that are somewhat supportive. Somebody even contradictory in the, in the report. One is saying that, uh, despite what procurement will tell sellers that. They cited cost as their success metric most frequently by a wide margin and internally, but then you’re also on the other hand site that, that you found that buyers push hard on price, but price really isn’t the issue.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, well, it’s, it’s kind of funny. So the price is less of an issue with the business buyers. Uh, and we asked, yeah, there were probably, I mean, there’s, there’s been a ton of. There there’s a body of research over the last 50 years that I’ve seen on how price sensitive buyers are and just how price sensitive people are.

Consumers are. And 20 to 30% of the population. If you look across the variety of academic studies, um, 20 or 30% of people are just sort of wired to be super, super, super price sensitive, but that means eight or nine out of 10 people. Um, look at price as a part of the mix. Mmm. The interesting thing was we asked procurement, uh, with an open ended question and there was a little bit more than I think 200 procurement buyers that we asked.

We asked them, uh, what the purchasing metrics were used, um, to determine their success. And 62% of them cited cost factors. Meanwhile, we look at the actual mission statements of some of these purchasing departments. Uh, we didn’t identify anyone, but it was things like this, uh, purchasing department mission statement.

This is an actual one. Uh, purchasing is dedicated to providing and managing for our customers the most effective and efficient procurement processes and procedures for the acquisition of quality goods and services in the support of our company’s mission and goals. Listen to this primary consideration is to provide the best possible quality goods and services to our constituents, with price being secondary to quality.

However, when we ask the people in this purchasing department, what their success metrics are, they all set costs. So it’s a nice little thing to have this mission on the wall, but when they sort of get into the jungle of what their jobs are, cost, cost, cost, cost, cost, or you don’t get a bonus. That’s crazy.

Andy Paul: Yeah. Well, I interviewed a guest last year. It’s similar type thing is that yeah. Procurement is aspiring to be judged on more overall business metrics tied to outcomes, but at the end of the day, they still default to price.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, I wish I was taller. I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a wife and a kid. I would call her. I mean, I wish I had a pony, but it’s not true, but I’m certainly not putting it up on my website. My aspirational goal is to do more than just ask for a lower price. I mean it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s literally hilarious.

Just how, what they say and what their actual metrics are and what they sort of do every day. Um, just how different they’re.

Andy Paul: So is there anything in the report that you, uh, research about whether procurement is increasingly out of the loop on purchase decisions and even, even negotiations on price.

Mike Schultz: Uh, Oh.

Andy Paul: some, something about that. Not specifically about some it purchases were increasingly yeah. Procurement was sort out of the loop.

Mike Schultz: Uh, not that I know about, um, you know, the buyers that we talked to from a business perspective, uh, none of them indicated that purchasing is being backed off of, uh, and most of them said that purchasing is. Uh, involved and is now starting to actually be involved a little bit earlier. Um, but no, I didn’t hear that purchasing was left off.

Andy Paul: Alright. So one of the key finders was that, um, talked about are so early in the report was that top performers are, Hmm, better top sales performance, or better at negotiations, then those who aren’t top performers. Um, but you say in the study that, you know, some of the factors you talk about are really as much about good selling as good negotiation.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, certainly good selling is good negotiation, but let me actually just, um, just provide some specificity of what we looked at, we didn’t look at top performing sellers. We looked at the differences of top performing sales negotiators. Those who were satisfied with the outcome of negotiations who achieved their pricing targets and who were confident.

In their ability to negotiate. So we looked at people who are actually better at negotiation, and then we, um, because there’s. So we, uh, it was two parts. It was part survey. So if you achieve your price target, you were confident negotiation and you were satisfied with the overall outcome. That was one. And then we, uh, we do, um, actual sort of human research spot checks.

Checking in with those people who identified themselves as top performers versus others with the actual organizations. And we got more of the qualitative, you know? Yeah. He’s really good versus, Oh yeah. He just caves all the time. So we sort of double check survey research with actuals and we sort of norm out the data like that.

Andy Paul: So how would you define a top performer in negotiations?

Mike Schultz: Uh, a mix of being satisfied with the negotiation results themselves. Um, for the negotiations that they have, that they achieve their price targets. Um, because if you achieve your price targets, you’re more likely to be doing well in negotiation and that you were confident participating in negotiations.

So it was a mix of those three things.

Andy Paul: But interestingly, you had this huge gap, your report in, in the study itself about between the seller’s perspective of how well they do in terms of presenting the business case and the ROI, as opposed to the buyer’s perceptions of it. So, if that’s the case. Yeah. How, how are these peoples are coming around to being top sellers on top performers and negotiation? There’s this huge gap. What are they doing to close that gap? And that perception gap

Mike Schultz: I don’t know what they’re doing to close the perception gap, but it was. I mean, so this is sort of the endemic challenges of doing research. Like this is that you do, you are essentially basing a certain amount of this on opinions, but we did spot check the data to see from the sales manager’s perspective.

If the people had identified themselves as doing a good job, Uh, doing your job, uh, achieving price targets. And if they were the one that they would want going into a negotiation that they would say yes versus the other ones. So that was one. Um, and it’s not like it’s not like, you know, testing for correctness on a knowledge test to say, yeah, 85%.

I can do, you know, I can, I can, um, Tell you what happened in the battle of Waterloo, so that it’s really hard to be precise about these kinds of things. But I think the gaps were, were in the opinions of what the buyers like to versus didn’t like what the buyers, uh, appreciated when sellers did versus what the sellers thought that they liked or didn’t like, but sort of based on the hard facts of being satisfied with the negotiation and achieving your price targets on a winner.

Um, yeah, that was sort of the, you know, the identification criteria versus the lens by which they said negotiations, you know, they appreciated or didn’t appreciate it.

Andy Paul: Yeah. I mean, I’ve, I’ve found some of the data, but from the buyer’s perspective, perhaps some of the most illuminating in the report and sort of lines up with other things we hear, which is one. Okay. So is that, that only one in five buyers, believe that sellers deeply understand their own ROI case,

Mike Schultz: Yeah.

Andy Paul: sort of aligns with other research we’ve seen where, you know, 80% of sea level buyers don’t believe they get any value from sellers, wires, clearly feeling this.

Mike Schultz: Yeah. So buyers are clearly clearly feeling that. And that was going to say the exact same thing is consistent with what, what we found when we teach our foundations of consultative selling course based on our, our method, RAIN. RAIN stands for rapport, aspirations and afflictions impact in new reality and impact is the most challenging thing.

Uh, in fact, we press really hard and have for the last decade that before we do any kind of rain selling, um, sort of foundations of consultative selling workshops that we do pre-work and analysis with the company to identify their impact model because in the actual classrooms, Sellers are literally like deer in the headlights when it comes to doing investment and return modeling.

And to be able to say, what am I actually going to change for you? That’s going to get you a financial result. That kind of financial literacy is one of the most difficult things to find. However, In the top performers versus others in the self identified top performers in terms of like, you know, achieving the price targets and competence in negotiations, the sellers themselves were more than double the likelihood that were top performers to say they understood how the solution met the buyer’s business needs and ROI.

66% of the top performers, um, answered that, uh, in the affirmative and only 31%. Um, only, only 31% of the rest said, I, we understood how our solution met. Um, the business needs an ROI. It’s a big report that one’s on page 22. I can’t remember all of this. It’s an eighty page report, but

Andy Paul: it’s, it’s sort of works out when you think about the math though, is that if you take 60% assume you have an 80 20 distribution, uh, yeah, it works out about 13, 15% of sellers, not too far from one Oh five, one in five, but are able to do that.

Mike Schultz: Pretty much so that, so that is actually a, um, that’s actually a good takeaway for the sellers. Ask yourself, look in the mirror and say, can I do the math? That would be impressive to the CFO of my buyer. That is a, not just a walk of a wild ROI case, but a plausible ROI case based on solid, underlying changing of assumptions that I believe you could make the case could be achievable for me.

Sometimes with the ROI calculators out there, it says, well, if you give us $10,000, you’ll get a hundred million dollars in the next three weeks. And it’s just like, it’s all a load of crap. So maybe plausible defensible ROI case. If you can’t do that, like get help because it makes a huge difference.

Andy Paul: Right. So, which identifies a huge gap that I’ve been talking about for a while in sales and they’ll show you have, as well as we’ve got this gap of they’ll call it business acumen, financial literacy in sales. And it speaks directly to what you’re just talking about is. Yeah. I might be able to come make a pitch about what we do and, and what the value prop is.

Well, when I got translated into action, that’s relevant to the buyers. We really fall short. So how do we train? How do we train people in this? This is, this to me is, you know, how do we educate people about this? Uh, cause I don’t see companies doing it and it’s certainly not happening yet, but it’s not like we expect people to come out of college and know this it’s a lot of this is experiential based, but we have to fill this gap somehow.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, we have to fill this gap somehow. And that is essentially what we do when we wake up and go to work every day. So, you know, And in some ways, this sort of ROI case making, and you do sort of have to, there’s a certain amount of financial literacy training, but it’s usually only three or four or five factors that need to move for you to be able to show how, how an impact case actually becomes sort of financial.

So it’s usually not that big as big of a leap as people think, but it’s the kind of thing that if you don’t know that. And then the buyer says, well, we’re going to need a better price. If you don’t have a plausible understanding of the ROI case, then you’re just playing a, you’re just playing a game of chicken.

You don’t want to negotiation to be a game of chicken or a game of tactics. You want to understand your leverage because of the difference that you can make. So, I mean, I wish I could wave my wag magic wand and say, here’s how you train people. Here’s how we sort of make a sea change. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s hard work because we do it all the time.

I mean, I can say that that, that we’ve had success in doing it, but I certainly can’t say that that one has a silver bullet. I can only say that there’s an ROI case for teaching yourself how to make an ROI case, because if they can, then they can, they can sell more sophisticated things.

Andy Paul: Oh, absolutely. And then something that’s sort of a cousin to that. That’s also in the report, which I, again, found really interesting is. And I think a huge disconnect is that, and this is self reporting coming from, from sellers that only 33% of sellers strongly agreed that they can articulate their value in differentiators over their competition.

Mike Schultz: Yeah, no.

Andy Paul: that, that one just, I started stopped on that one. It’s like, self-reporting right. Your suspects, you would expect sales people to self report. Something different is, is only a third said, yeah, we really even know how to sell our product and position it against. The competition

Mike Schultz: well, and that, and that was in the conversations that we had. That was a thing that came up and that we talked to some people at let’s call them big software company and that software company. We would say things like, how does your software make a difference? And they would say, Oh, most of our clients are doing one, two and three.

And when they change it, they save this. They save that. They make more revenue, things go faster, they have less heart ache, all that kind of stuff. And then when they said versus the competition, they would say, yeah, competition can do the same thing. So the tough part was making this taste against the competition.

More people were able to make the general do it, or don’t do it case, but when it came to the competition, that was something that, you know, the sort of what we call the ability to see succeed in the wind lab. If you’re going after a huge sale, you know, the buyer’s going to say, yes, the question is just, who do they say yes to?

Um, this is a more sophisticated and muddled battle kind of thing. The sellers have to go through to be able to win. Um, But just in general. Yeah. That’s another area that’s tough. And it’s kind of funny. We, we asked a lot of the buyers, just got me thinking about the buyers and what works for the buyers.

Um, almost everyone. When we asked sellers to guess we had a webinar with over a thousand people and we said of these five tactics, what do you think is the number one tactic that works the best for buyers? And we listed five tactics. One of them was we need a better price. And then other one was meet us in the middle and then everyone thought that that was one and two.

Oh. And we need a better price and let’s split the difference. But the number one tactic that buyers say it works for them is using the seller’s eagerness to get a deal done by ringing out a final concession. It’s a tactic in our training programs. We call one last thing it’s like, and I have my pen and I have the contract.

I had to check in my hand. But before I sign it, one last thing sellers fall all over themselves at their time of lowest leverage and drop out one final concession. So it’s just hilarious. The kind of things that in part, when we’re talking about ROI and we’re talking about, um, we’re talking about, um, Sort of battle planning against the competition, that sort of big, heavy stuff, but the buyers are like laughing all the way of the bank when they just, they just like wring out a final concession because they ask, so there are the sort of.

Basic tactical, you know, you know, face Palm kind of stuff that, that, that, that, that a lot of the, of our clients, as much as we can show them how they can have huge wins, if they can do those sort of more heady stuff, they also just see a percent or two here on margin, like crazy by just not getting their ass kicked by stupid crap that they don’t have to get their ass kicked by.

Andy Paul: Yeah. The usual BS tactics that the procurement uses cause they work right.

Mike Schultz: Well, and the business buyers business buyer’s doing as well.

Andy Paul: So you just briefly, we didn’t have a ton of time left. I just wanted to go through quickly, your six central rules of sales negotiation. First one, always be willing to walk.

Mike Schultz: So always be willing to walk a lot of sellers going in and you can almost feel it if you’re observing the sale, it’s like they need the sale that, and once buyers feel like the seller is just itching to make the sale, they know that they can squeeze you until the very last second until you’re basically crying before you say, I can’t do this.

But when, when in your mind, and that’s why this is first in your mind as a mindset. If you go in knowing that you do have leverage and you do have value and that if the buyers don’t want to buy, then you can just go someplace else. They can feel that. And the seller, and that’s sort of like just a precursor to any ability to succeed with sales

Andy Paul: And it’s so important. I learned this lesson. That’s a story I tell myself as is. My first big, over a million dollar deal. Um, and so it was in Midwest. I fly out there with my boss and I had no idea that he was going to do this. And we were, this was meant to be the last meeting. We were going over, you know, final points, negotiate with the CEO and C level people, the buyer.

And at one point, my boss, the VP of sales just gets up and says, well, Hmm. I thought you guys were serious buyers. Uh, Thanks for your time and walks out the door. He doesn’t say Andy, come along. He just walks out the door and I’m sitting there my jaws dropped. Right. It was like, Oh shit, I have this big deal sitting here.

And so he seems like he’s gone. So I get up and start walking out. Yeah. They come chase us down and say, yeah, yeah, we want to buy it. But I mean, he showed it to me firsthand.

Mike Schultz: yeah, like don’t toy with me and, you know, and, and, and, and you’re sitting there, like I just learned from Don Corleone, how to do

Andy Paul: I just about wet. My pants is what I did. Yeah. So the second one is build value, sort of talked about that.

Mike Schultz: Two parts of build value. One is you have to do a great job in the sales process, making sure that you answer those four questions. If the buyers know why, why now? Why ask? Why trust? You’ll be in great shape to start and the alternatives won’t be as good second is when you actually get down to especially big agreements sometimes like they, this is literally where the wind, when stuff comes in and by the way, we didn’t find the, um, The the top performers to be more likely to use win-win over other kinds of things, but it’s a different, different discussion, but let’s say you’re in the position where you’re literally trying to solve problems instead of just cutting price here and cutting price.

There, we find a huge amount of sellers. If they can come up with creative solutions to contracting terms, agreements, added value, they can hold price in ways that really make buyers happy. Uh, without just cutting. So if, to the extent that you can figure out value before the, for the negotiation, during the negotiation itself, uh, you can be much more

Andy Paul: Yeah, absolutely. There was a, a report research report reported on the HBR Harvard business review. It was maybe eight years or so ago. These professors talk about tie-breaking selling and they’ve done some research and found just what you just talked about is oftentimes when you get to that last bit, and you’re tempted to cave that extra one, two points on price to close the deal, because that’s fine.

The non-cash things that make a difference. And they all exist. You just gotta be creative and doing it. And then the Bible they found it actually is, the buyers are more likely to close with those people, offering those types of solutions than somebody saying here here’s an extra one, 2%.

Mike Schultz: Yup. Uh, in fact, they, they really appreciate those non-cash things. For sure.

Andy Paul: Okay, well, the last one we’ll talk about will people have to read the report, go to your website and get that is, uh, you start talking about trade don’t cave and be creative. Find a way to come up with something that’s perhaps non-cash.

Mike Schultz: Yeah. Uh, so it’s, it’s not just a find something, but it’s literally just like don’t cave. So if someone asks you for something, don’t just say, yeah, sure. In 90% of the situations, it’s better to ask for something back and I will leave it. Like this top performers are 2.6 times more likely than the rest to be prepared to trade.

Meaning that they know what they can offer back to say, yeah, if yeah, I can do XYZ, but you know, that’s kind of a big ask. Would you guys be willing to do a video testimonial for the work that we do with you? Assuming that three months from now, you’re happy with how things are going.

Andy Paul: Yeah.

Mike Schultz: Can get like that. And that company is a huge name. That’d be worth 50 grand to you, but what are you prepared to ask for?

Andy Paul: Well, in part, what you may be prepared to ask for our power, what you may trade is say, yeah, we could do that, but we’ll have to take this off the table from a deliverable standpoint.

Mike Schultz: Or we certainly could drop the price on that, but right now we’re looking at an 18 month license. Could we go to a 21 month license and extend the license by just three months in order to achieve your overall target of et cetera, et cetera.

Andy Paul: yeah.

Mike Schultz: so it depends. And that’s where you have to be able to do the math, to know the financial value of what, what, what they’re asking for and what you want to ask for that.

Andy Paul: Yeah. When I was selling, really, I’m not saying multimillion dollar deals. My most effective technique was what I talked about is we’d have this whole thing put together the offer so that if they tried to negotiate on anyone part, we’d say, yeah, well, we could, we could pull that part. We could de scope the deliverable based on your needs, but you know, if you want a lower price and the business buyers would never let that happen. And they would always roll the day over procurement at the end of the day.

Mike Schultz: Absolutely.

Andy Paul: Alright, Mike, fantastic. Has always talked with you. Um, how can people learn more about this report and RAIN and so on?

Mike Schultz: Uh, pretty straightforward. If you just go to RAINgroup.com or Google RAIN group, uh, you can go to our negotiation section of research and pick up a copy of the report. We also, in our white papers, having a bridge version for anyone to download, um, based on the research here, just find the negotiation white paper, and that’ll be it.

Andy Paul: Alright. Perfect. Well, Mike, as always fantastic. Talk to you and look forward to doing again soon.