Course 18 · The benchmark library

Course eighteen, the benchmark library. Over twelve hundred vendor pages. By the end you can read any of them.

Lesson one. Finding your vendor. Type the name in the search bar and the pages suggest as you go, or press control K from anywhere in the app. One habit will save you time: the largest publishers are split by product line, because they do not price as one vendor. Salesforce alone breaks into Sales, Service, Platform, and more. So search for the product you are negotiating, not just the company.

Lesson two. The anatomy of a vendor page, on Salesforce. Learn this page and you have learned all twelve hundred, because every one is built the same way.

The promise at the top is precise: your deal placed against real closed deals. Not survey answers, not list price theory. Transactions that actually signed, for this product, near your size.

Your Salesforce deal is the input panel on the left. Currency, your net fee, the seat count, the region, and the list value when you hold one, plus the deal structure levers like term and competitive presence. The verdict updates live as you type, so refine as the quote refines.

Saved scenarios turn a check into a record. Each saved position feeds your portfolio view, prefills the page next time, and can watch the market for you. Save every serious quote you place here.

Every dot is a deal, drawn size against rate, and yours is marked in the field. This chart is your evidence when a stakeholder asks where the range comes from. Point at it.

Pick the target you will actually ask for. The page offers three: a defensible floor at the peer midpoint, a strong close, and a stretch anchor. An ask without a target is a conversation, not a negotiation.

The path from list to your target prices the walk: the list paper, what you pay today, and the close you are aiming at. Read it before the call.

When to strike matters as much as what to ask. The page reads the vendor's calendar and names your window, then sets up the plan that carries the asks in order.

Three words to keep from this lesson: the bands, the evidence, the levers. The bands say what buyers your size are offered. The evidence is the closed deals behind them. The levers are what moves your number, each priced, with counters for the pushback you will hear. Verdict, evidence, play. That is the whole page.

Lesson three. The case rooms behind the page. We are on Workday now, with a deal placed. Above the results sits a navy band, open this verdict as a full case. Watch what happens when I press it.

One click, and the page becomes a case: executive brief documents built from your live numbers, your deal sheet, the verdict brief, the field atlas, the ask sheet. The pills along the top swap in the other rooms, Compare, Deal room, Second opinion, without losing your place.

Notice the case is not a snapshot. It recomposes from your deal panel every time you open it, so when the numbers change here, the ask sheet and the verdict move with them. One position, one truth, everywhere.

Saved scenarios earn their keep in the Compare room. Pick up to three saved positions and replay them against today's data beside the deal on the page, and the room names the strongest one and what the gap is worth per year.

The verdict closes the loop: the money at stake, the rank in plain words, and the doors onward. From here you can open a deal room on the contract, or a second opinion on the whole position.

Two questions before the assignment. One, why search by product rather than company. Two, name the three rooms a case can become. If either is fuzzy, the lesson is a minute away.

Now you. Open your three biggest vendors' pages, place one deal on each. Fifteen minutes. Course nineteen, reading a report like an analyst, follows.