Streamline your onboarding process for sales team in Vendor negotiations

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I wish there was a secret there isn't the name of the game is being prepared you have to be prepared to negotiate and I have got some slides I want it with some overheads I wanted to show you but I have to tell you when I was my first well I was going a car I went to Washington University in st. Louis and my background is in business and being a business person and having run subscription agencies I was the operations vice president fax and I worked for EBSCO around the Midwest or APSCo I had my own subscription service I took it from basically zero sales in the house to over forty million dollars and then sold it and I think the time he is it was pretty good to sell it get the heck out of it anyways one of the things that impressed me when I was working for this company in st. Louis I was the office boy was the sign they had over the front door which said the prepared mind wins out the prepared mind wins out so you have to do your homework and that's extremely important in any negotiations knowledge is the key to negotiation know what you want understanding the research is understanding the faculty understanding the students it's very very important that you reach out to these groups and you get an understanding of what they need what they want I have to say one story my negotiating skills were exemplified I suppose because one of my halves the operations vice president of facts and I was responsible for all of our data processing and the computer side of the business and we kept evolving involving evolving and what I would do is I would call the salesmen in and say to the salesman ok can you negotiate and you empowered by IBM to negotiate well they're not empowered to negotiate so I get the sales manager in and say you guys because the sales manager wouldn't come in with a sales without the salesmen you guys well questionable so then I would go after the the regional manager salesman the regional mayor branch manager and get him in along with the sales manager and the salesman and they could negotiate and this is the process we went through one thing that we're interested in faction was having what they called customer service support and that meant George felts George was the customer service engineer they MIT graduate he could play with our computer we let him in the computer room and actually could key in codes into the computer we let him do that but we wanted them there at least two days a week he said okay now what do you expect in return that his commitment or the your commitment to have him available two days a week they said well we need at least a half a million points they call them points or Dauntless half a million dollars in sales I said okay that equates so disk drives new computer what have you we will commit to doing that half a million dollars a year in new business if you'll commit to having George Phelps available to us in our office two days a week they said sure no problem so we had a deal that's how you go about negotiating by the way then they said well let's go to lock overs for dinner so we went to lock overs in Boston ed you know lobster dinners but that's as a side point the negotiation is a process it's the you you really have to be knowledgeable know what you want and what you expect and then the academic environment my my academic experience is really limited to Washington University in st. Louis where I spent 30 years on their library Council and I'll tell you what's going on in the academic world is really really difficult you have so many options available to today that it's confusing to say the least but it's important that you reach out each and every one of you reach out to the different departments to the researchers to the faculty and to the students and find out what their expectations are what their needs are where they're going what they expect from you you know it's it's all available and free on the internet today but somebody's got to pay for it see if I can do this up screwing things up too badly first of all it's a people world we're dealing with people all the time and knowledge is power and we're looking at problem-solving you want to be a good listener when you're a negotiating process you want to ask specific questions and you want to ask for clarification you know it's clear them to me as a salesperson but what's wrong with you you ask for clarification you ask for definition that's very very important negotiating with publishers we've got a number of publishers here this is my publisher negotiating checklist one of the things you want to find out is what there are archiving policy is what about access what are the print options what are the print holdings who are authorized users am i authorized user is a remote user at Washington University Libraries living in Concord New Hampshire I don't have to live in the Washington and the st. Louis suburb authorized user is it does your library belong to a consortium do you have consortium membership you have consortium access all the things that you have to be aware of and it's just part of the negotiating chuckles that you use you should also prepare the publishers I did with IBM there's a representative the salesperson empowered to make changes to the contract to the and then if time out contracts there's a legal aspect of negotiating do you have to go through the university law lawyers in order to get a contract sign what can you what can we do to reduce our cost how do we go about reducing it what do we need from you in your organization that make you successful that's very important to determine what's gonna make the salesperson successful to be successful if you give a if I'll give you additional business when you consider reducing the cost good question you know you're gonna add more more money into the bucket you know what's the benefit to us what can you do to minimize our exploit a minimizer exposure ask the questions question question question ask for clarification along the way I have to tell you a story about my experience with negotiation I was up in up in Maine and decided to go out for dinner and we went to a little restaurant there that it was serving lobsters the lobsters you know that's part of Maine being where was a cow from Vermont that's probably right about annoying of those lobsters so we're up there and I said they had to for I don't know what there were 695 and that included the French fries and coleslaw and you know what you expect to get with a couple lobsters so smartass buzzy says well what about three lobsters how much you gonna charge me for that instead of two I'll have a real feat he says well I don't know how to go back and ask the owner so she goes back he says well he wants 395 he wants an additional $3.00 would be 995 so well that's not bad how about four she says you got to be kidding I said no I'm not kidding wanting to go back and forth so I go she goes back and come back about two minutes later three minutes later and says that'll be 1495 I said what that's five dollars for the fourth Lobster that doesn't make sense she says you know you're right let me go back and ask him she goes back and ask him he says that's what it is negotiation right then and there I stopped with three lobsters that was enough another story was that you should be aware of is that this couple was on vacation up and get up in Maine and they went into a grocery store and their grocery store has hamburger we all look at hamburger this hamburger for 395 a pound and his hamburger for 595 a pound so the woman's calls over the owner and says well what's the difference why is it looks to me to be the same you know it's red it's got fat in it what have you he says that's 395 and that's 595 he says no I know I can read that but what's the difference he says the difference is that some people like to pay 395 and others like the pain 595 so if you want to be a 595 pay up fine that's good you don't ask any questions but that's my stories so there's no mitt there's no magic to negotiating your way through this and then what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna turn it over and let Margie tell you some of her stories about how she negotiated and was successful you ready I think I'll turn off this machine you're gonna have it later um so my name is Margie love I'm president of excess innovations it's a company I found it ages ago 40 well some 40 years ago so I've known buzzy a long time in fact buzzy and I were active together in a couple of associations the Asus American society for information science was later added and technology and also the special Libraries Association and somewhere along our checkered past buzz he was elected Division cabinet chair which represented all the divisions within the special Libraries Association and a year later I was elected Division cabinet Chair Elect so you know he's a fairly August presence and I wanted to learn from this man and I said to him so what are my duties and he said your duty is to get me coffee excuse me err I'm a young woman I'm in my suit I'm ready to be you know the powerhouse person and this dude tells me my job is to get him coffee so I did decaf I got the coffee I said buzzy I have your coffee I walked over I gave him his coffee mr. Basch your coffee sir and everybody knew that I was making a big deal out of it and they laughed and the next break I got him his coffee again loudly ostentatiously it was the best it was really the best way to deal with it so one of the things I encourage you to do as a person in negotiation probably the number one thing is keep a sense of humor this is not a death match this is not all that important that you have to kill yourself and your reputation over this one contract you have to be ready to walk away you get to my notes here I'm a little more modern than buzzy so the basics are clear right read the contract and I don't mean give it to somebody else to read the contract I mean you read the contract I love to give a contract to Jay that's my favorite thing but if you don't also read it you don't have any idea what you're getting into and the fine print is real important because that's where all the gotchas are so you have to read the contract and be be pretty clear on what it is the contract usually has two or three parts to it one part is the declarations in blah blah blah second part so this is a party of the first part of the blah blah blah and we're going to so this University and that vendor are going to do business that's declaration second thing is the statement of work or something that outlines what is the the nature of the deal and the nature deal is really pretty clear but what it doesn't include is not always so clear so you need to look for what's missing as well as what's there I think that's that's part of those gotchas and then the third part of the con is usually the legalese and that can be fairly extensive whether it's a service agreement or a purchase order there is always supporting legalese and you need to read it it has to do with how fast you're gonna pay or get paid depending on which side of the fence you're on and how they can withhold either data or money depending on whether things are met whether stipulations are carried out and so forth so it's important to read those and understand them and in our case we have I don't know eighty a hundred contracts running for projects at any one time and they've all gone through legal so our legal is pretty simple but the other guy is legal particularly if it's a university with a law school seems to take forever I think they get paid by the pound for the amount of red line that they put in those contracts and you just need to read those decide what you're going to be able to accept and what you can't accept but go ahead and read that contract and then read it again one of the things either side of the negotiation is can they pay do they really have the money I mean buzzy talked about whether they have the right to negotiate or not but do they actually have the money to pay you is it their budget or the negotiating on behalf of somebody else's budget when it's somebody else's budget and there's a third party involved that can get pretty awkward particularly when you're trying to get paid later so this is a this is a new project and it's being grant funded by this granting agency that's been in the papers because the CEO embezzled multi billions of dollars and so do they really have the money to give you the grant so that you can negotiate this contract so that you can pay the vendor so you can get the materials you'd be amazed at how happened how often those kinds of things happen so be sure that the people you're talking to are the ones who can pay don't talk to the intermediaries talk to the ones with the budget it's also real important to know what you would take what's your bottom line what are you willing to agree to and at what point is it really most sensible just walk away there isn't anything you need so badly that it should kill your business kill your organization make you be overcharged have things be under-delivered you have to know what when when can I just say you know this just isn't going to work for me and I'm leaving I don't care if it's on the dating scene or whether it's in a contractual negotiation you have to know at a gut level when you should walk away what are you going to take and if it means that you have to write it down in advance because you get into the the passion and the deal and then you go on just one more thing one more thing you're like a gambler you have to accept that you you're done you're out of cash you spent your allowance go home you don't want to get too emotional in these deals this is a small business we are not the huge commercial industries this information and library and publishing business is pretty small and people are constantly changing jobs they work at this university then they work for that vendor then they go over to work for some hosting organization and so people are constantly revolving around they carry a lot of information with them they also carry grudges they have long memories and they remember when they were dealing with so-and-so or their friend was dealing with so-and-so at that library and you don't want to get a reputation in this small business of ours as somebody who's not any fun to deal with so keep your sense of humor and don't get emotional don't make enemies these people be on your side in the next edition one of the things that you might consider is not care I have a friend that just I think that's her every other phrase a cure whatever it's up to you and she negotiates the biggest darn deels it's just amazing to me and she gets them for a song but her her reaction is always I don't care whatever they can do it I don't mind and care he's really really well I can't do it the way she does it but it is I don't care take it or leave it it's not a bad attitude to have you do want to be diplomatic no name-calling no slurs no she's a blah blah XYZ as my granddaughter used to call them and you might study selling techniques whether you're the one who's doing the selling or whether you're the one who's doing the buying it's real interesting to know what the selling techniques are and people have there there are lots of videos on it there's lots of books on it and if you're the buyer you should understand what the selling techniques are so a good salesman to my mind isn't gonna say so you want it huh you're going to buy a big car and it's an expensive purchase and you're just not sure and you're wobbling back and forth they don't say so do you want the car they say do you want the blue one or the red one and you make a minor choice it's a small choice but as you make that choice you're closer to buying and then they say cloth interior or leather I just didn't you think about that and every question like that those small questions lead you to the big sale so if you study the selling techniques you'll have a much better idea of what they're what they're suggesting to you but you can use it the other way around as well so whether you're on the selling side of the buying side if you understand the technology on the science because there is a science to sales of what you're dealing with and you can move pretty quickly through the process so if somebody sees you reading one of those how to sell books it's not a bad thing and there's a lot of them that are just basically bullet points but they're very very helpful I particularly like lead a boy myself but you can read whoever you want Li Dubois lead a boy let's see what else have I got here the customers not always right excuse me but the customer is not always right they don't know sod all about what it takes you to build this product but they are the customer so I will say the customer is always the customer but I will not agree that the customer is always right and in a couple of minutes I'm going to go over a quick thumbnail of what it takes to build a digital project because that's an important part of your understanding of what it is they're trying to sell if you can you should let the other guy make the first offer get a stake in the ground get an understanding of what the deal is what are the parameters what's a ballpark figure you don't need exact figure because you haven't gotten to the exact nature of what all you're doing but get a good idea of what the what the parameters of the deal are and let them ask let them make the first offer and of course get it all in writing everything in writing because if it's not writing you didn't buy it I'm sorry but you didn't write it down it wasn't part of your deal I don't see that in the contract and remember that it might be you and someone else negotiating the contract it's a completely different set of people are going to do the implementation and they weren't there when you were doing the negotiations so they don't know what you talked about they don't know all the side stuff that you bantered about and that you kind of agreed to you didn't write it down it's not in the contract it's not going to happen so you need to have lots of examples lots of specifications lots of details and what it is you're buying or what they're selling because if it wasn't there how is your colleague going to know what they're supposed to get and how is the project manager the sales on the vendor side supposed to know what they're supposed to liver wasn't in the contract I'm sorry those people left the company and went to work for somebody else you won't know so get it in writing appeasement doesn't work if you think well I could do a little more for you I could get there I could move it forward and all that shows is it's your week and they can keep on pushing for a better deal so don't try any impeachment in your negotiation process you are negotiating every single day when you go to order to restaurant you are negotiating what it is you're going to get for your food did you want fries with that do you want that medium-rare how a temperature do you want your hamburger do you want the coleslaw or do you want the squash or do you want the salad what do you want every one of those is a negotiation back and forth and you can get an excellent meal if you negotiate for it well like buzzies three lobsters he couldn't have eaten four in the first place he was just testing them so you know you do need to keep track of what hat you're wearing so one of the things for yeah more than half of the people in the room is there are women and you're negotiating often in a man's world fortunately in library and publishing there's a lot of women but remember that you don't have to be one of the guys when I worked at NASA I was an engineer I was the only female engineer I was the only female manager and I went to coffee with the guys twice a day and I didn't become one of the guys but I did help them girl watch I could point out particularly good specimens to them and they appreciated it so it was kind of one of those When in Rome kinds of things you can be part of the group and not be exactly like them and I think it's important to keep that perspective all right let's see what else have anything else yeah I think that's good enough so the other thing I wanted to talk about in my few minutes yep I'm good right was what it takes to build the digital product so that there's been a lot of this well if it's electronic it must be free I can it's just it's just bits and bytes it's in the ozone it's digital therefore it's free and you know what it costs a lot to get that data into that digital format what we've been doing is first you've got to gather all the data and it takes a lot of double-checking to make sure that all the data that you thought you were supposed to get is actually there so you need to do an inventory to make sure that the data you thought you're going to deliver or you thought you were going to receive it's actually the data that was expected so you need to do a count you need to watch the logs you need to be sure that all that data is there and when that data is all collected then in order to make it usable in a library environment or a digital environment a website or whatever you need to be able to search it for example you want to look for something in it you don't want to just have a big pool of digital stuff over here that you have to string search you want to enhance the metadata you want to have author you and have title you want to have subject headings and all those things need to be added individually they just come in a big blob in a digital file particularly if the file has been ocr'd so I was talking to a friend of mine and she said we have at our university library digitized 11 million pages I said wow what is that like the new microfilm it's just thrown in there and how do you get it back out again how do you search that stuff she said well we ocr'd I said oh how could she LCR well its ocr'd so it's probably good right said did you OCR it from digital files no we it's all newspapers and writings some senators papers and so on well so how do you know how good that OCR is and we filled the dictionary seven hundred fifty thousand words which is more than Webster's unabridged to test against OCR will her OCR had five percent readable words against the seven hundred and fifty thousand word dictionary five percent the computer can't read that I'm sorry so in order for that OCR data to get cleaned up we had to run it against three different OCR packages then we merged the results into one big data file and from that data file we were able to get a 40 percent readable words which is still not a huge amount but it was good enough that we could index the data files and create a metadata record for for the library that's just one step then we need to pull out the entities the geographic locations we want to be able to say this is the first author this is the second author this is the title this is the topic and all those things need to be parsed into something that if I just gave you the readable page it wouldn't matter if the document was from the 1600s or from last week you'd be able to read it but that's not true in the digital file so there's a tremendous amount of stuff that goes on in creating those digital files and making them searchable after you've collected all the data and you've made it into a regular searchable format or readable format for the computer then you need to load it into some kind of a software package that'll make it available to the users some kind of a platform and the OPAC or a journal platform or whatever and then on top of that different users get different rights if there a subscriber they get one kind of rights if they're a member of the library they get another kind of rights if they're the general public they can maybe only see the title or maybe only see the title and the abstract and keeping track of all those rights and permissions is not a trivial task people get real annoyed when they don't have their permissions properly stated as you probably all have the lashes too to see that so there's a lot that goes into the creation of a digital project I teach an all-day workshop on it so I'm not going to do that to you today but be aware that digital is not free in many cases it's much more expensive to create than the paper product was so I think that's it buzzy any questions you know now buzzy this is this is a matter of negotiation he just sat next to me and said you're gonna say something aren't you I am so yeah jayven human CEO of access innovations and as Margie said she founded the company for more than four decades ago and I've been there all of that time I like the way buzzy started this afternoon's session by hand by passing around the mic with the question why are you here that's a very good question and that's the first question you should ask when you sit down let's say you sit down with Steve from highwire press god forbid he takes you into room with no windows and closes the door right put you on the other side of the paper what's it once yeah and you ask you should ask yourself why why am I here why am I here and then the whole series of questions that he put up on on the slides there what is the purpose often negotiations you think are all about price rarely our negotiations about price it's about value and that's what you should think about what value are you getting what value do you need to deliver to your institution so there's two sides of the value what value are they providing and what value do you need to deliver and how can you leverage that so we are living in as a saying goes in interesting times we have in office now in the White House one a person who will probably go down as one of the greatest presidents of all time if I'm not gonna ask for a raise of hands but I think the vast majority of people in here had an emotional reaction to that comment and that was done deliberately not saying I believe that I don't but but you had an emotional reaction so what if I asked you this side of the room is going to debate that proposition on the positive this side is going to debate that issue on the negative no he isn't yes he is just like in high school and debate class how would you feel about that if you were on the side you didn't want to be on very difficult negotiations is a very emotional process particularly when you get down to the nitty-gritty and you've been at it a while it's very emotional just like the kind of emotion that a comment like I made a political comment I made a Hot Topic comment it kind of raises your blood pressure you feel a little heat coming up in your face it is an emotional process so as buzzy said duriandurian force one of his things be prepared because when you're prepared you're not going to get as much an emotional reaction that clouds your vision and your judgment if you're prepared you know what you want to get what you're trying to accomplish so think about that yes sir that's that's an yeah go ahead yeah for subscriptions usually the discussion is about price today it seems like the discussion is much more about open access new models trying to figure out what the library what the university is what the researchers want what the publishers can do and more than a negotiation it seems like it needs to be a collaboration but I haven't heard that term used at all today so I'm a little confused no you're not you're not confused it should be a collaboration I mean we all talk about win-win it should be a win-win it should be a collaboration and yes you're trying to solve some problems maybe you don't know what the solution is going into the discussion you talked about well we don't know what the package should be you know we don't know what we could leave out let's say for you're trying to negotiate a bundle of journal titles and on one of his buzzy slices you know what kind of access do we have I mean is it digital is it paper is it both yeah what about open access well if it's an open access journal is that in the bundle am i paying for that can't I just open up the my site so that gets back to my comment about a stand over here and I can see that gets to my comment about value you know what value do you need to get what value do you need to little deliver to your users in it's extremely complex and so you're right sometimes you go and you don't know so you what you need to do when you make an appointment with an event a vendor to vendor wants to talk to you is to make clear that in the first couple of meetings it's a it truly is exploratory you may not have a budget most of the vendors in this room here are aware that large institutions both public private have budget cycles so they wear what's your fiscal year where are you in the butt do you have the money say well no I don't I'm trying to put it together I have to have my budget in by the end of the calendar year or something like that so I have a number of problems to solve in where do you fit in the equation so yes it's a collaborative effort it should be the vendors trying to help solve some problems they can't solve your problems if they don't know what they are I mean just because you're a vendor of a collection of journal titles serials and you know you have a bundle doesn't mean you know what what they want or that you have the solution for them maybe you need it delivered in a certain way a certain fashion you need to have certain rights or you know you can't give up certain things I mean one of the common things I get involved with in negotiations it seems like a simple thing but it's venue the contract or the license or the agreement has a this contract if there's any issues gets adjudicated in the state of New York or something like that venue well most state institutions it's against the law for the University of New Mexico you know to have a venue that isn't in New Mexico you can enter you can't negotiate that so what's your alternative well one alternative sometimes they'll buy into is no jurisdiction at all so so you you have to come around to what what are the limitations again budget isn't our price always seems like the big issue but it rarely is I've said that earlier I'll repeat it its value if you're getting enough out of it that you can deliver enough what sort of metrics now this is very it gotten to be a lot more popular and sure if you run into this is what sort of metrics can the publisher or the aggregator provide you that you can feed back to show value do they keep track of enough pieces of information about usage etc you talked to Steve from highwire press how can you keep track of the volume of where the interest is you know you know art is there a narrower or focus than we think can we cut out things in terms of what's what's on the high wire platform that you're getting from the journals that are in their discovery platforms that are out there so what what can you metrics can you get the more metrics you can get the easier it is to try to provide a measurement of value of what value you're providing and making it easier for you to get the budget you need to acquire those resources yes okay yeah for those who didn't quite hear that is to get a vendor to put up your logo to see you know to get some visibility we saw I was at an interesting presentation the one before this before lunch by judy russell the dean of libraries at the university of florida who has done a wonderful project with biblia labs which is a local company here in charleston in conjunction with Barnes & Noble and Amazon of putting up the university's theses and dissertations in a print on demand scenario and they do put in the information if you find a thesis or dissertation searching amazon's particular topic and it happens to be in this product with biblia labs it does state that the University of Florida so they get some attribution that also says that you can get it's in their collection so if you have access to the libraries there are Friends of the library or a student you can go in and get it for free you don't you don't need to pay the print it's a very it's a very wonderful model if you get a chance if you know jr. Russell or get a chance to talk with her or the folks at Biblio labs here it's a it's a very interesting product and it gets much much wider distribution of that content outside of the particular library and even outside of um I that gives the exposure for the authors for the PhD students and they all want some you know develop a reputation that's how they get a job we're looking at a little bit before three do we have questions from Margy or buzzy at this point yeah we got tore here and I'll come over and so you can hear what he's asking her comment he's making the question that have probably is more tuned to all of you is the librarians are the ones we deal with to make the purchase but the librarians are not the ones that use the journals not used by the faculty how do you bridge that gap between the librarians and the faculty sometimes the journal is bought by the librarians but the faculty doesn't know of that how do you bridge that gap there are of course a lot of techniques for doing that not the least of which is the discovery platforms to get out there and then the metrics that measure who's using it there's you know a student is it a you know what level undergraduate graduate advanced so there are some metrics on some of the discovery platforms and the OPEX that where the you know when you have a license and the materials use how it's used that could be perhaps other additional solutions there are updates to the library statistics standards like counter and other things like that that provide basic information and guidelines on how to how to collect information on usage and the idea is that usage is the best indicator of how much people like or don't like a particular resource and those play heavily into repurchasing or you know the next time you're going to buy stuff you want to see how well you did last time journals for miscellaneous reasons are very much into the impact factor which is a somewhat subjective measure of how good the journal is and we'll see how it holds up over this next few years in the light of plan s and open access and other things that are changing the model that we currently operate under the other change yes so change they're rapidly changing the entire publishing map I also think to have time for a screed okay okay I also think that open access is going to spell the death of libraries and if anybody wants to talk to me about that in detail I'd be happy to do that because in asking that all the valuable resources that they've bought and curated over many many years be open access and free and available without any embargo as soon as possible it doesn't just up in the publishing model it up ends the model for libraries because models of libraries are modeled on buying selecting curating collecting some very very valuable resources and if those resources have zero value because they're all free then why do we need the library and if you look at a lot of libraries now they're converting their stacks because the stacks are digital into event spaces and coffee shops and other things and I'm gone that's really valuable resource real estate and it's usually right in the middle of campus and it's going to be swiped by somebody in the administration because all you're doing is making it available digitally that said there are some libraries that have been born digital like the National Transportation library has three cubicles and that's it and they do everything that way and but it's a completely different model so we need to start thinking about them models with open access plan ass gdpr etc can you hear me now I guess again I have the opportunity to go to Europe 1t well gold more than once here but I go to conference over in Europe once a year and it's fascinating to me to the air the differences between the European library community and the US library community on open access as far as the Europeans are concerned everything should be available for free whereas in the United States somebody's got to pay for it we just haven't figured out who yet but the the other point is what I learned here was about that access that the publishers here should be aware of is making sure that the the library's name gets on their screen or on those displayed when somebody accesses an article or a journal I think that's very very important and the library certainly libraries in the United States can use as much PR as possible they should get every little bit that's something you can do negotiating is concern I want to go back to the basics it's a people world it's not a computer world it's a people world remember that and you're part of the people and you do the negotiations and the prepared mind is going to wind out so what you want to do is make sure that you know you've talked to the selectors you talk to the researchers you've talked with the students and faculty and you find out what they need what they're thinking and you're going to get all sorts of an you know the variety of answers you're gonna get is all over the board but at least you've talked with them and you got a sense of what's going on out there and that's very very important to know what your users need you're a problem solver and remember that knowledge is very very powerful today and will continue to be make sure that you're a good listener give the vendor the opportunity to explain their point of view listen to what he or she has to say and how they're saying it and what they have to say and remember to ask specific questions very very specific you want clarification clarification is extremely important to you and to the salesperson that you're asking and you know there's no dumb questions ask lots of questions and lots of success to you they give they're very well questions questions questions I understand that there's a break now and the we're all eligible to pick up some cookies some drinks or what-have-you and they're gonna be served outside this room here so you're welcome to join in the festivities thank you thank you [Applause] you