New commercial leadership at a large manufacturer in Asia-Pacific commissioned a structured diagnostic to assess negotiation capability across its sales teams, revealing consistent behavioral and relationship gaps that were undermining commercial outcomes.
New leadership had recently taken over the commercial function at a large manufacturer in Asia-Pacific. Two senior leaders, one promoted internally and one brought in from outside, had inherited a sales organization they suspected was underperforming but lacked data to confirm where the gaps were or how deep they ran. Anecdotal evidence suggested the account teams were leaving value on the table, but no structured assessment of negotiation capability had ever been conducted.
The scope covered the teams managing the company's most significant customer relationships. The diagnostic needed to deliver a clear picture of how these teams were actually engaging with counterparties, not how they believed they were engaging, and provide a prioritized set of recommendations that leadership could act on.
The diagnostic combined structured behavioral assessments with in-depth interviews across the sales teams and their leadership.
The assessment mapped how each team approached its counterparty against how the counterparty approached them, creating a paired profile for each key relationship. It also measured relationship depth: who on each team had access to whom on the buyer side, and at what level of seniority. Interviews added context: how teams prepared for customer interactions, what they believed their mandate was, how they interpreted signals from counterparties, and where they felt constrained.
The findings were stark and consistent. Across nearly all teams assessed, the same pattern emerged: the sellers were operating with a highly collaborative posture while their counterparties were engaging on purely transactional terms. The delta was significant and measurable. In practical terms, the teams were investing in relationship-building and flexibility with counterparties who were treating the interaction as a price and terms exercise.
One team showed a markedly different profile, managing a counterparty whose operating model was structurally transactional and did not accommodate relationship-building. That team had adapted accordingly. The rest had not.
The relationship mapping reinforced the pattern. Teams described strong, well-developed customer relationships, but actual access rarely extended above the counterparty's direct management, even at senior seller level. The sellers were investing heavily in relationships that lacked the seniority to influence outcomes. The gap between perceived relationship strength and actual access was consistent across nearly every account reviewed.
Taken together, the findings told the same story from different angles: the teams believed they were building strategic partnerships, but the behavioral data and the relationship access data both showed otherwise.
The diagnostic delivered a prioritized set of recommendations spanning negotiation capability, go-to-market approach, and organizational alignment. Some recommendations could be addressed through targeted skill development. Others required structural changes to how teams were briefed, incentivized, and supported.
The immediate impact was giving new leadership the evidence base they needed to drive change. The behavioral data provided a common language for discussing performance gaps that had previously been difficult to articulate, particularly in a cultural context where direct criticism of sales results carried sensitivity. The organization subsequently invested in developing its negotiation teams, informed by the diagnostic findings.
Most engagements started exactly like this one.