The Big Picture: Your Route to Data-Driven Negotiation & the Big Score

One of my best friends in school was a terrible student. He never cracked a book, never studied a day in his life. But when test-time came, he was cool as a cucumber. Just unflappable. I figured out from an early age that simply learning something was a lot different than being able to apply it, when the rubber meets the road…

Here on the blog, and in our book, How to Manage Phone Book Advertising for Efficiency & Productivity, we’ve spent a lot of time throwing different tips, tricks and methods at you, to help you find the best rate for your phone book advertising.

All of these are great on the page, but what happens when you’re in the room with your rep? How will you know what method to use when? Here is a real world scenario, where we planned our strategy and got where we wanted to go…

Our client’s phone book ad contract was up and they were struggling with the renegotiation process. They let us take the reigns. The scenario:

• They were running a full-page ad in a smaller, rural phone book.
• The sales representative was raising the rate for the same amount of space.
• This book offered cover-space, for a much larger price.
• They made the choice to stay in the phone book, but wanted a killer rate.

A New and Improved Scenario:

• We reviewed how the client’s book stacked up. Michael discussed this on Monday in his video.
• We found that the client’s full-page ad was near the fourth in a section of six.
• The book had no half-page ads.
• No one was buying the cover ad-space (premium territory for a premium price.)

We went into negotiation knowing our expectations. But more importantly we knew the order in which we were going to demand them:

• We told the rep we wanted the cover ad. We were gonna pay for it (we may have negotiated it down a tad, but not much). He was excited to sell this cover space.
• Then we took a half-page ad instead of our full-page. He immediately came back with the negotiation tactic of moving to the back of the line…
• But we knew there were no half-page ads in this book, so really we were losing two pages of placement position (not much). He conceded.
• Finally, we said our half-page ad was going to be the only one in the book. It would have to be redesigned from our classic full-page spread. And the printer would need to move up the quarter-page ads to cover the blank space…
• Since our half-page ad was already at the back of the full-page ads — why not just keep our full-page ad design, only charge us for the half-page and take out all the work for everyone? We had already bought the cover space — We’re practically his best friends!
  He agreed.
• Now the ads are running and working — pulling leads for the firm. Success in efficiency.

So at the end of these negotiations this is how this buy shook out —

• The Rep asked a higher rate for our client’s same full-page ad.
• We got a full-page ad at half the cost, lost just one page in placement and used the money saved to get the Cover Space.
• Effectively, we paid the same rate and got the cover for free.
• We could only do this because we knew:
  • What our client’s book looked like before the negotiations.
  • We should lead with a “demand” that would make the representative happy. One of our favorite Negotiation Tactics!
  • Which negotiation tactic the representative would use to block our demands.
  • And we needed to hold our “friend card” until the very end.

So you can see, it isn’t simply knowing all of our methods which makes them successful, but planning a strategy of when to use which method to get the most out of your negotiation! You can only make a difference when the rubber meets the road!