I have signed a fair few seven-figure deals in my career, with real price pressure on every one and a heavy discount to close. Several of those customers, I later learned, had budget for 10 to 15% more. A lot of money left on the table. It looks like a pricing problem. It rarely is.
What actually drives the discount
Most distributor sales forces default to discounting the moment a competitor undercuts. The move supposedly protects the deal, but it erodes the value proposition of your products and services. And when your best salesperson with twenty years of experience leaves, the institutional knowledge goes with them. Battle cards live on outdated PowerPoints. Tokyo, Shanghai and Detroit position the same product three different ways. The MD or Sales Director becomes the bottleneck for every contested deal.
That is not a pricing problem. It is a knowledge problem wearing a pricing problem’s clothes.
Make company know-how queryable in the room
What changes when your company’s hard-won knowledge becomes queryable in the moment a deal is contested, self-hosted, owned by the business, deployed across every region and language your team sells in? The rep facing a competitor’s undercut does not reach for the discount. They reach for the argument: the right positioning, the right proof, the right objection handling, in their language, instantly. This is exactly what our Sales Performance work builds, and why we deploy it on infrastructure the business owns.
A question for distributor-led teams: is the discount reflex a pricing problem in your business, or a knowledge problem? And what would change if your global sales team had instant, secure access to your company’s know-how, in their own language?