This afternoon, we're running the Webinar: Wholesale Negotiation 2021 session — free to attend, live, and open to any member who's ever sat across a video call from a buyer wondering whether the connection is really the problem or whether it's just an easier thing to blame than the number they asked for.
We scheduled this one deliberately for a summer when almost none of you are doing this work in person. Regional cheese buying events that used to happen over a folding table and a sample tray have mostly moved onto a screen, and wholesale marketplaces themselves have leaned into it: several of the larger platforms have said openly that their virtual trade events aren't a pandemic stopgap, they're staying, because buyers have gotten comfortable running price comparisons in a second window while a supplier talks. That's not a complaint about the format — plenty of members have told us a video call is easier to schedule around a make day than a drive to a hotel ballroom — but it does change what a good negotiation sounds like.
What today's session actually covers
This isn't a pep talk about knowing your worth. It's practical: how to open with a number that reflects your real cost base (this is a good week to have Monday's feed-cost numbers in front of you), how to handle a buyer who wants to negotiate over chat instead of out loud, and what to do when a wholesale account tries to renegotiate a price mid-conversation because a competitor's line item is sitting open in their other tab.
Business writers covering this shift have made the same point we're building the session around: negotiating on video changes the mechanics, not just the medium. Silence reads differently on a call than it does across a table — a pause can look like hesitation instead of consideration — and it's much easier for a buyer to end a call abruptly than to walk away from a table mid-conversation. Knowing that going in changes how you pace the conversation, and it's the reason we've built practice rounds into today's format instead of just lecturing at you for an hour.
If you can't make the live session
The session is virtual and free, so there's no travel cost keeping you out of it, but we know make schedules don't always cooperate with a fixed start time. A recording goes up for members within a few business days, and it's worth watching even if pricing already feels settled for your operation — the format questions, how to structure a call, when to go quiet, how to close, apply just as much to a landlord renewal or a distributor contract as they do to a cheese order.
If you want a second opinion on a specific price sheet before your next call, several members active on the Events Committee have offered to look at drafts informally. Ask in the member forum and someone will usually take a look within a day or two, and if you missed Monday's post on this summer's feed-cost squeeze, it's worth reading before you sit down for your own negotiation.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.