Deal Strategy Assessment
Grade your negotiation strategy against best-in-class deal data from over 40,000 deal negotiations that ClearEdge has assisted in, involving the inspection and analysis of more than $60B in IT spend. Take the Deal Strategy Assessment to find out how prepared you are for deal success.
The Risk Hidden in Your Deal
Why is it Important to Achieve a Favorable Negotiation Position?
Technology adoption has exploded due to the recent trend of enforcing all-remote workforces, forcing IT acceleration and transformation for most business enterprises. The commitment customers make to standardize and integrate technology within their businesses results in high switching costs and makes it hard to ever switch off incumbent technology providers. As a result, many customers find themselves entrenched with their vendors as they gain a reliance on their solutions. This “reliance” translates to a lack of leverage at renewal time, often leaving customers vulnerable to large price increases and locked-in annual costs.
This Deal Assessment will analyze your current negotiation strategy and compare it against the best deal practices aggregated across all ClearEdge client engagements to identify areas of improvement and risk mitigation for your organization.
The Deal Strategy Assessment Grading Criteria
A Measure of Your Negotiation Position
Vendor sales teams are masters at executing their intricate deal strategy, winning over customer stakeholders, constructing convoluted and complicated spending models, and growing their product footprint within a customer’s organization. These activities occur as the sales team actively works to eliminate any and all sources of negotiation leverage you may have.
To assist our clients in achieving best-in-class deal results and compete against any sales team, ClearEdge developed a negotiation framework and methodology that walks organizations through the necessary steps, tasks, skills, and action items to maintain and preserve negotiation leverage with any supplier. Our methodology, the Leverage Management Maturity Model, was created by analyzing deal trends across all client engagements, providing the necessary data, insights, and knowledge to properly define the best practices when it comes to executing a successful deal.
Our Leverage Management Maturity Model Framework highlights that organizations who excel in these 9 areas consistently demonstrate best-in-class deal execution:
Early Warning System
Do we have an organized approach to starting deals on time?
Risk Assessment & Inspection
Do we understand all contractual and business risks?
Forecast & Modeling
How much product/service do we need, and when do we need it?
Deal Timeline Development
Have we documented a calendar of deal-making activities?
Supplier Knowledge
How might supplier sales systems and motivations affect my deal?
Deal Option Development
What deal alternatives or "Plan Bs" do we have?
Information Control
What information will we protect, and what will we share?
Executive Engagement
Are executives informed, aligned and participating on the deal?
Messaging Development
Are we controlling the story with credible and consistent messages?
The Deal Strategy Assessment Report
After you take the assessment, you will receive:
Deal Strategy Summary and Overall Leverage Score
ClearEdge will create an executive summary that details the overall vendor relationship with your organization, the observations made from your assessment results, and your overall grade on how prepared your organization is to start negotiations and drive best-in-class results. This section will provide a high-level overview and visualization of how well your organization is currently performing in each of the nine areas highlighted in ClearEdge’s Leverage Management Maturity Model Framework.
Deal Strategy Scorecard
To provide context of the results and feedback highlighted in the Executive Summary section of this report, ClearEdge will provide a detailed score breakdown for each of the nine categories in the Leverage Management Maturity Model Framework. Each category will be accompanied by a specific grade for your organization and comments made by ClearEdge subject matter experts justifying the score assigned.
Areas of Improvement and Recommendations
ClearEdge will detail the major areas of improvement that your organization needs to address with recommended actions that can be taken to mitigate the risks currently presented in your deal negotiation. In addition to recommended actions that your business can take to ensure deal success, ClearEdge will also provide related service offerings that can augment your team during the negotiation process.
Grade Your Deal Now
If you are interested in receiving the custom Deal Strategy Assessment Report highlighted on this page, feel free to contact us to set up a meeting to discuss your most pressing deal or take our online leverage assessment survey now and we will follow up with more information.
Take the Assessment Now to Gain Access to the Report
TAKE THE DEAL
STRATEGY ASSESSMENT NOW.
This Deal Strategy Assessment takes into account best-in-class deal data from over 30,000 deal negotiations that ClearEdge has assisted in, involving the inspection and analysis of more than $60B in spends. Take the Deal Strategy Assessment to find out how prepared you are for deal success.
WANT TO GRADE YOUR DEAL?
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NOW.
If you’d like to receive a personalized report and more in-depth insights on how your deal-making activities compare to others’, click the link below to schedule a meeting with us.