How to Deal with Back Door Selling

Designed for Anyone and Everyone in Your Company Who Talks with Suppliers

The Workshop
A Training System

Designed to provide a thorough and highly participative learning experience.

This fast-paced 3-hour course is designed for EVERYONE who talks to outside suppliers.

Using a DVD, large and small group discussions, and a 50-plus page workbook/resource guide, this workshop reveals how suppliers are trained to deal with customers.

It explains that every time you talk to a supplier, you need to be aware that you're involved in the negotiation process.

Specifically, the workshop focuses on how suppliers are meticulously trained to ask certain key questions in a way that doesn't give the slightest clue of the devastation that they can wreak on your company's negotiating position – if you answer them in the wrong way.

The workshop helps identify numerous "Back Door Selling" questions, explains why the salesperson is asking them, and most importantly: how should you respond to protect your company's negotiating position.

The goal of this short, but fascinating workshop is to even up the training between the salesperson, and anyone who talks with them.

  • Sensitizes the participants to the professional salesperson's use of back door selling techniques
  • Teaches the participants how to respond to back door selling questions
  • Empowers the participants to neutralize back door selling and protect your company's negotiation leverage

The DVD – A "Real World" Dramatization of a typical sales call

Through a series of vignettes, the DVD dramatizes how an unsuspecting employee (in this case, an engineer) can literally give the company store away to a salesperson who is skilled at asking back door selling questions.

The Workbook

  • Augments the points presented in the videotape and reinforces learning
  • Designed to stimulate participants' total involvement
  • Serves as a framework for roundtable discussions and participant role playing
  • An effective, on-the-job "refresher" for daily use
  • Serves as a reference guide in how to deal with salespeople and how to answer their back door selling questions

Key Points Stressed by the Workshop

  • In a negotiation, information is power. The person who has the information, has the power.
  • You are involved in the negotiation process every time you talk with an outside supplier.
  • You do not have to answer every back door question just because it is asked. You can "fog" it, deflect it, tell the
    salesperson it is not an appropriate question, or ask the salesperson a question in return.
  • If there is no leverage, there is no negotiation.

BNS also offers an online version of this workshop. Contact us for more details.