Dan Francis is a sales manager for WRT Electronics, and his team of sales engineers call upon original equipment manufacturers located primarily in Los Angeles, California, and Tucson, Arizona. Hughes Aircraft is a large manufacturer with multiple government contracts for supplying helicopters, communications equipment, and weapons systems to all branches of the U.S. military. WRT functions as a subcontractor, providing electronic components for nearly all these systems and platforms.

In the most recent visit to the satellite communications component division in Los Angeles, sales engineer Ford King was told by the purchasing manager, Carly Moore, that WRT would be in a bidding war with two other suppliers, and that price would drive the negotiations. Moore's position was that all components must meet military specifications; thus, they are commodities. After going to lunch with Moore, King met with Ravi Das, chief design engineer for the project. Das told King that conformance to standards was crucial for winning the large contract. In the last meeting of the day, King met with Ron Jones, who heads up quality assurance at Hughes in Los Angeles. After meeting with Jones for an hour and asking questions about Hughes' needs, King was informed that any problems with quality would result in immediate disqualification as a "preferred vendor,'' and that the orders would be split between the other two vendors. King immediately called Dan Francis to ask for advice.

Dan Francis is a sales manager with 20 years' B2B experience, he knows that participants in the buying center play distinct roles, and are motivated by different outcomes. Sitting in freeway traffic in Orange County on his way home, Francis tries to make sense of the conflicting messages his sales engineer had received from three managers at Hughes. What strategy should he recommend to King when he visits the Hughes account again in two weeks?