“A successful negotiation must be beneficial for both parties.” Arthur Jennequin (EDHEC 2021), National Key Account Manager – Procter & Gamble
(Expert voices 3/3): A series of interviews with professionals engaged in pedagogical challenges devised by EDHEC Business School. The experts share their professional expertise, explore the subject of the challenge and discuss their role in this learning exercise.
At Procter & Gamble, Arthur Jennequin is National Key Account Manager Baby Care with responsibility for the Leclerc chain of stores. During the néGO! Challenge* event, he assisted students in finding solutions to the negotiation cases proposed by his company. In this interview, he shares details of his background and career, as well as his participation in néGO!
Why did you decide to take part in EDHEC’s néGO! Challenge?
As a former EDHEC student, I remember this competition as being my gateway to the world of negotiation and sales. I’d worked on the Amazon case and that matched what I wanted to do: selling and negotiating. Taking part in the néGO! Challenge today also gives me the chance to present the different types of negotiation jobs and therefore to dispel the cliché of the unprincipled salesperson overly fond of haggling and intent on selling at all costs.
What did you do before joining Procter & Gamble and what prompted you to specialise in negotiation?
Before graduating from EDHEC’s Master in Management programme, I did my gap year at Procter & Gamble in 2019. After this experience, I was promised a job and joined the company formally in June 2021. I began as a sales manager in the Annecy area, where I was in contact with mass retail stores. I learned a great deal from this 18-month experience.
I then moved to Procter & Gamble’s head office as a Category Leader, a position that gave me the opportunity to work closely with the marketing, sales and retail teams. I then progressed to the position of National Key Account Manager, firstly in charge of Oral-B and Fixodent with Leclerc, and now with responsibility for Pampers, with the same retailer. I also deal with the Eurelec European central purchasing body for Procter & Gamble brands.
This attraction for the business world and the client is what prompted me to specialise in negotiation. As an aside, during my studies, I was prospection manager and treasurer for the Raid EDHEC student association. It was my first contact with negotiation and I loved it!
What key learning points do you want to transmit to students, whether in terms of knowledge, behaviour or good practices?
The key point is to listen actively, so that you can identify the problem your client is trying to solve. I don’t negotiate to prove my product’s the best, but to show I can provide a response to their problem. It might be a problem of price, margin, personnel, logistics, a defective IT system, or a problem of space in a warehouse, etc.
By understanding the client’s problem, you can prepare the negotiation meeting, develop different scenarios and define the contractual limits given to the person mandated to negotiate commercial agreements in the final client’s name and on their behalf. Preparation is 80% of sales or negotiation.
Practising - even in your personal life - is what improves your negotiating skills. During my first few months at P&G, I had 2-3 sales and/or negotiation appointments a day. They enabled me to learn, to test different approaches and to improve.
And of course, you need to appreciate the product you’re selling and know how to adapt! I’ve sold the dental category, a market with enormous growth potential, particularly thanks to the development of electric toothbrushes. I’m now negotiating sales of nappies against a backdrop of a declining birth rate and strong competition. The business issues are very different and the way of negotiating as well.
A successful negotiation must be beneficial for both parties. Commercial disagreements may arise from time to time. You have to try and defuse them with constructive proposals, sometimes by trying to broaden the discussion and/or approaching the disagreement from another angle.
* The néGO! Challenge is a learning project in which 700 EDHEC Business School Pre-Master students familiarise themselves with sales negotiation techniques through practical cases proposed and assessed by the School’s corporate partners.
