What I learned after spending 1.5 years negotiating a $40M contract renewal.
Vitality Index Case Studies
Large Account Growth System
Have you ever been in a successful contract negotiation that lasted a year and a half? I have. It was one of the best experiences of my large-account sales career. The main victory was not how long it took. It was knowing the work to defend our pricing and profit margins was done before the RFP landed in my email.
Why did it take so long? Because procurement had to hunt down all of the proof we'd claimed in our response, which essentially said we were too vital to lose as a vendor.
Now, you can imagine all the internal fear that ensues when an account this large issues an RFP. Every call I fielded from my internal team and leadership was met with a confident, "We're ready, and here's why we're ready." I was able to show them the evidence that our position was solid.
From the buyer's perspective, they believed they had a lot of leverage over our pricing due to the volume of spend they were doing with us. They also believed services like ours were replaceable. For the most part, they would have been right. At the time, our industry had a below-average NPS due to quality and service issues. So, they assumed we were just like everybody else. Little did they know they were the ones ill-prepared. They would spend the entire negotiation running their playbook to get us to come down on our pricing and margins, but it was already too late.
That was the critical error. They had not really conducted adequate due diligence on us prior to releasing the RFP. If they had, they would've learned how embedded we were as a partner. We had multiple account champions, relationships with several key executives, and were already considered a vital partner to some of their largest sites. We had well-documented case studies and proof points to back up our pricing and defend our value.
None of these things happened by chance. We take a systematic approach to winning, growing, and protecting large accounts. We mapped every corner of this relationship, the strategy, the planning, and the execution before receiving our first purchase order.
That's the real difference between how this RFP landed for us and how it landed for our competitors, each of which dropped rates even though the majority of the spend was with us. Small wins for procurement that justified the RFP event, but a major victory for us. The pre-work was the key difference. The competition was hoping an RFP would not drop, and we were hoping it would because we were ready to defend our position based on the system we were running.
Our system, the Vitality Index, anticipates threats to our pricing and value message and is always working to ensure our teams are well-positioned to defend them. Even when we add new people to the account team or new people show up on the client side, we remain on track. The system is always running, and it's agnostic to who's operating it. Therefore, your results can scale because the system itself does not depend on one person to keep the account strategy moving, regardless of what's happening on the team or on the client side.
In summary:
- The preparation was complete before the RFP arrived.
- Procurement thought they had the leverage, but they had not done enough due diligence.
- Our competitors feared the RFP while we wanted it because our position was built to expand, scale, and last.
- These are just a few attributes of the Vitality Index system.
Winning, growing, and protecting large accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. Successes like these formed the basis for the Vitality Index, a web-based system that shows B2B salespeople how to exponentially grow complex accounts. The system will help most sellers willing to master strategic sales in less than a year. If becoming a top-producing account team is important to you, then the Vitality Index can help.
We made a sample for you to try. This is not the actual system, but it will show you a practical plan for growing a live customer in your portfolio. This snapshot will give you a diagnostic, analysis, and an actual growth plan based on where you currently sit across two of the seven Partnership Domains: Relationships and Competitiveness.
See how your account measures up across the same 7 Partnership Domains and 21 Growth Drivers.
Take the free assessmentThe Vitality Index, the Large Account Growth System, builds Vital Partnerships that last.
This interactive system is ready to help you grow large accounts today. Take your first account assessment, get your new account growth strategy and start executing the account plan the system creates for you, tailored to your exact partnership level across each account.
Account teams can now generate a growth strategy in seconds, watch it evolve in real-time, always progressing toward Vital Partnerships. Vicky, your Vitality Index AI Assistant Coach, will help guide you on your large account journey. She can make recommendations, set up your accounts, assist you with taking assessments, make suggestions for executing account plans and update your Google or Microsoft Office calendars with action steps you want to plan, schedule and share with others.