Emily Barsky’s Pro Tip

Video Transcript

Emily: One of the things that we actually did for our AEs was gave them a list of discounting levers and put them in order and said, “Okay, here’s the first discounting methodology that you could use — this is what we prefer as a business” and went all the way from one down to seven.

And so the AEs knew what levers they had in their back pocket to run those negotiations, but also like at what priority they should be pulling them out based on what we need to do as a business. So I think that was really helpful. Because when you think of discounting, sometimes you’re just like, okay, 10%, 20%, this is what the rep was allowed to do.

But there’s so many other ways that you can structure a contract to be beneficial for both parties that isn’t always just about the discount, it can be throwing in extra volume, offering a migration of data, etc.

And so by educating the team on the different levers that can be had for discounting, I think that opened up a lot of doors and made them more autonomous in their negotiations.

Dave: Nice and then did you set that up in CPQ? So it was almost like a rules engine to say, you know, if you’ve offered this then you can offer a 5% discount or not, or is it more education and awareness?

Emily: Yeah, exactly. So it’s all set up in CPQ. So when you go into the higher quantities, it automatically drops the price down for you and then we have the approval rules in place as well.

So if you go above a certain dollar amount or a certain percentage, it gets kicked off to your sales director to approve and then BP and so on, so that’s also been a nice value add to our process.

Previously, we were doing all of our pricing approvals through emails. And every single time a contract would come in, I would have to like search my inbox and be like “Okay, where’s the pricing approval for this? Is this correct?”

And so the fact that it’s all through a system now and Salesforce has been really helpful for keeping us all organized.

Want to learn more?

Ready to learn more about the selling tactics that Emily Barsky uses at Codat, as well the what she looks for when expanding to new markets and sub-industries?

You can listen to her in-depth interview on Episode 1 of the Revenue Optimists series. We’ll see you there.