The Adapter’s Advantage Podcast: Episode 20 Featuring David Bauders
Welcome to The Adapter’s Advantage: Breakthrough Moments that Lead to Success. In episode 20, SPARXiQ Founder and CEO David Bauders shares how sales organizations can adapt to the new normal, the power of analytics to accelerate sales performance, and why you learn the most from your most demanding customers.
“The golden question is, if there are pressures on me to sell, what are the pressures on the other party to buy?” — David Bauders
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Bauders’ goal is to help his clients sustainably create and capture higher economic value. After beginning his career at IBM and Booz & Company, Bauders launched SPA (Strategic Pricing Associates, Inc.) in 1993. Since that time, SPA has generated $100+ billion of profitable growth for over six hundred organizations, including twenty-five Fortune 500 companies, and is a leading provider of profit-maximizing analytics.
Bauders recognized a consistently growing skills gap in sales forces’ ability to navigate evolving buyer practices in today’s disruptive digital economy: core selling skills, negotiation skills, financial acumen, strategic client-relationship building, and emotional intelligence.
In 2015, he established a second company, SPASIGMA, to fill that gap and meet distributed sales teams’ need to access virtual sales training and sales enablement support. SPASIGMA produces binge-worthy content in Hollywood, transforming expert content into today’s modern media formats.
In 2019, Bauders merged his companies to create SPARXiQ. SPARXiQ provides integrated analytics and training solutions that accelerate sales performance, profitability and long-term enterprise value.
Successful sales organizations must adapt by showing flexibility and resilience in the face of today’s new challenges. Listen as Bauders shares how sales leaders can leverage analytics tools and training solutions to make better decisions about pricing, prevent lopsided negotiations, innovate to solve customer problems, and boost profitability by scoring a touchdown every deal instead of a field goal.
Episode 20: Driving Sales Performance | David Bauders
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From This Episode
Host Mark Magnacca: “Can you describe a personal pivot point or a moment of learning that changed your approach as CEO of SPARXiQ?
David Bauders: “Sure, and there have been a lot of pivot points over the course of my career, and I suspect for most people listening today. For me, the big idea has been that the more time I spend with real customers—and particularly the most demanding, sometimes difficult customers—the more we learn. The more we learn, the more we can innovate.
“At the end of the day, innovation is about solving valuable problems for customers in the real world that they live in. And if you don’t spend enough time with customers, then you’re left speculating about things that you really need to discover.
“In the world that we live in, innovation is critical to our success as a company. It’s innovation that helps us make it better to be our customer and harder to be our competitors. It all goes back to the key insight, which is you can’t really innovate unless you spend tons of time with tough demanding customers. That, to me, has been a revelation.”
About The Adapter’s Advantage
Our podcast features leaders from sales, training, and industry who share their personal journeys of transformation and how they are adapting to an ever-changing environment. As your host, I’ll introduce you to some of the most interesting and inspiring people I’ve met over the last twenty years.
The conversions dive into the ups and downs of their journey. Our guests focus on inflection points—the aha moments that, in retrospect, had a critical impact on their success. These interviews will leave you with practical, real-world advice that you can apply to your life.
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