My biggest deal so far. This is a multi-school opportunity sourced via a reseller in Taiwan, through a government bid/tender. Boy o boy do I have a story to tell what happened here.
It all started 3 months back when I joined the company for heading (kick-starting) International Sales. I was also handed over conversation threads from the past year with a couple of reseller in Taiwan.
The main problem (which never occurred to me till it happened) was how do we even get to know that these bids are happening in Taiwan? We have no control over them, and are entirely handled by resellers. As it turned out, I got to learn about this bid not from our reseller who won the bid/tender, but from the one who lost it.
He emailed me a month back to quickly hop on to a call, and was extremely pissed that our other reseller (who won the bid) used a lower pricing. We offer a 45% commission to each reseller on the base price given to both of them. I told him that if the other one lowers their price, they sacrifice their profits.
It's been a month since I've been explaining this to him, and he's still pissed. Keeps telling me how the market price would be unregulated if we keep letting this happen. And I keep telling him that I don't car because I'm getting the same amount at the end, regardless of who's selling it.
Nonetheless, this Wednesday, I was on a call with the entire team of the reseller company - including legal, VP, reseller, sales, an intern and some new person. The 30-minute call went on till 2 hours, since only 2 of them spoke english, and there was a lot of LIVE translation being done between the members on the call. Order form was signed yesterday
I think at the end, all the hassles, complications, laborious work and headaches have been totally worth it, when I see the deal value (this is 3X of our average deal size in US and 19X of our average in International).
Atm, I am begging Customer Success to do the activations today. If not done today, govt. can penalize the reseller - yeah! Taiwan's crazy!! CS says they're busy, but we all know that's not true.
2 more such tenders coming up in the next 2 months and i hope these resellers don't kill each other over it.. Happy friday war room.
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