【正文】 ty. Indeed, they accepted higher prices and longer, guaranteedvolume deals.A supplier can find out its customers?key buying factors and its petitors?blind spots, initially by questioning its sales and marketing employees and then by holding thorough discussions with its current and prospective customers. The insights it gains will help the sales force and managers weigh potential tradeoffs in negotiations with particular buyers. Say that one of them threatens to switch suppliers to get a lower price. If the sales force knows from the customer analysis that another buying factor梖 or example, the level of service梒 oncerns this customer less than price, the supplier can offer to cut both its prices and its service levels, thus keeping the customer and its previous margin. Such tradeoffs must of course be managed to assure that the pany balances the 8 / 14risk of losing volume and the ability to control fixed costs across the entire customer portfolio.An accurate knowledge of customers also gives a sales force the power to deny historic discounts, rebates, or other services that have ceased to make business sense. Such information, for example, inspired a large European aluminum processor to stop playing lifeguard for a disloyal clientele. Some of this pany抯 largest customers had begun to source up to 20 percent of their business from new East European producers. When the new suppliers missed a delivery date, the old one often rescued these customers by expediting their emergency orders, but the incumbent eventually decided to let them feel the full pain of the shift to lowerquality suppliers. As a result, 90 percent of the customers stopped using them and asked the incumbent for guaranteedsupply agreements at higher prices.SELL VALUEA knowledge of customers includes an understanding of their requirements as well as their economics. By looking at a product or service from the viewpoint of the customer and understanding its total cost of ownership and the way it creates value, a supplier can determine how existing or new offerings could help the customer add still greater value (Exhibit 2). Such value selling differs from the mon costsplus approach, which bases prices on the sum of cost ponents。1 / 14A new kind of professional purchaser bent on getting rockbottom costs threatens suppliers of basic materials. But these panies can save themselves by taking up the purchasers?weaponsThere is a killer on the loose near the start of the value chain. Suppliers of basic materials1 have seen tough times as their own suppliers consolidated and customers squeezed their margins. Now some of those customers are using a kind of sophisticated professional purchaser, known as a sourcer, who threatens to rub out the meager margins that remain. Armed with a detailed knowledge of the suppliers?economics, the sourcer spurns the traditional approach of building close relationships in favor of extracting the most value at the lowest possible cost. Some suppliers may not survive the assault.Indeed, this mismatch can destroy value quickly. One global producer of specialty lubricants recently acquired several service businesses in an effort to distinguish itself from petitors. The initial strategy was sound. But then sourcers demanded that the supplier bundle its new services with the lubricants at no extra charge. To preserve sales volumes, the supplier acquiesced. In the end, what had started as a sensible effort to bine a chemical business that had a 5 percent return on sales with service businesses that had a 15 percent ROS gave the pany an overall ROS of less than 5 percent.2 / 14Some suppliers have suffered so much from the sourcers?attacks that countering them, rather than passively watching margins erode further, must now be a strategic priority. A first step is for suppliers to understand how sourcers have shifted the odds against them. The second is to use that understanding by fighting back