5 Ways To Get The Most Out Of A Negotiation Team

January 29th, 2010
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It’s Super To Have A Negotiating Team – If You Know How To Use Them

It’s Super To Have A Negotiating Team – If You Know How To Use Them

The Challenge Of Managing A Team Of Negotiators

Today’s sales negotiation sessions have become so complex that it’s almost too much for a single negotiator to handle. That’s one reason that more and more sales negotiators are being handled by teams of trained negotiators. This simplifies a lot of the record keeping and tactical details of a negotiation; however, it introduces a new layer of complexity – how to manage the negotiating team…

5 Ways To Manage A Team Of Negotiators

As though a sales negotiator didn’t already have enough to worry about, now there is an added burden of management that needs to be taken care of. Before you throw your hands up in despair, hold on for a minute and realize that your team is a fantastic resource – you’ll be able to get more out of negotiations than you ever have before. You’re just going to have to learn how to get the team to do what you want them to do.

There are five different management actions that you are going to have to take when you are leading a team of sales negotiators. Each one of these actions is fairly simple by itself; however, when taken together they can shape your team into an effective negotiating machine:

  1. Areas Of Expertise: all too often a sales negotiating team will just be thrown together with the right number of bodies in order to “match” the number of people on the other side of the table. Don’t do this! Instead, construct your team based on each person’s individual area of expertise. You should work to minimize the amount of overlap between team members in order to maximize the amount of expertise that you can bring to the table.
  2. Specific Jobs: just having people on your team in order to bring your numbers up is a waste of both their time and your time. Instead, make sure that you take the time to plan for the negotiation. Each member of your team should have a specific job that you have assigned to them You’re going to need someone to take notes, to do research, etc.
  3. Clear Communication: having multiple people on the same team can quickly lead to a communication nightmare. It’s not just that you can end up sending mixed signals to the other side of the table, but rather that you may get confused even within your own team. A simple way to deal with this issue is to take time before negotiations start and have the team agree on a set of hand signals that everyone understands. The most important of these signals will be the one that tells someone who is currently speaking to “shut-up!”
  4. Information Gathering: the basis of any negotiation is information. You’ll arrive with some information and then you’ll be constantly collecting more information as the discussion progresses. You will need to assign someone on your team to act as the information hub through which all information passes. If they haven’t blessed it, then you can’t rely on any information that you may have.
  5. Logistics: although this is the simplest of all team-based responsibilities, it often turns out to be the one thing that can trip up a team. Everyone needs to know where and when the negotiations are going to be taking place. As important roles have been handed out to different team members, you are going to need all of them to be present and accounted for when the negotiations start.

What All Of This Means For You

In addition to working on perfecting your negotiating skills, when teams of sales negotiators are involved you are also going to have to have management skills. Just having people on your negotiating team isn’t enough, you need to find ways to maximize their contributions to the negotiation.

In order to do this, you will need to develop multiple team leadership skills. These will include learning how to pick the team with the right skills, assigning them individual tasks, establishing clear communication, etc.

All of these management skills are easy to learn. What’s important is that you will need to remember to do them as your next negotiating session approaches. If you can do this, then you will have harnessed the true power of team negotiating.

What skill is the most important in someone who is leading a team of negotiators?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Man, what a hassle negotiating is. If you have to negotiate every single vendor relationship each time you need to have something done, it sure seems like you’re going to end up spending your time negotiating and won’t have any time left over to do everything else. There has got to be a better way…

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To Team Or Not To Team, That Is The Question

January 22nd, 2010
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It’s Easier To Make It To The Finish Line When You Have A Team

It’s Easier To Make It To The Finish Line When You Have A Team

Don’t you just love movies? Whenever there is a negotiation going on in a movie, be it with hostage takers or closing a big business deal, there is always the picture of the noble solitary sales negotiator doing his / her best to close the deal against almost impossible odds. Can you tell me what is wrong with this picture?

Say Hello To Negotiating: The New Team Sport

The arrival of the 21st Century has brought with it a great deal of complexity. This is especially seen when it comes to sales negotiations. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that almost all sales negotiations were carried out by a single negotiator – teams of negotiators were reserved for extraordinary deals.

However, due to the complexity of deals and their often technical nature, teams have become more of the norm instead of the exception when negotiating sales deals these days.

Why Bother Creating A Team To Handle A Negotiation?

There are a number of advantages of doing sales negotiations using a team of negotiators. Not all of these benefits may be obvious upon first glance. Here are a few of the most important reasons for using a team to negotiate your next sales deal:

  • Knowledge: As smart as a single person may be, a team will always bring more raw knowledge to the table. It’s just a fact of life that a team of negotiators will have had more experiences and more diverse experiences than any one single negotiator could possibly have had.
  • Creativity: In order to reach a deal with the other side of the table, the ability to create a novel deal that works to the advantage of both sides is a critical skill. In order to make this happen, the creativity of the entire team is going to have to be harnessed in order to search out all of the possible solutions to the issues that will arise during the negotiations. A single negotiator will hit a brick wall when a team is still going strong and creating ways around issues.
  • Details: It’s a fact of life that it’s the little details of any sales negotiation that can result in a deal that is good or bad for either side. The challenge in modern negotiations is trying to stay on top of a sea of constantly shifting information and understanding just what the ramifications of each agreed to change will be. This is too much for one person and perfect for a team where responsibilities can be divided up amongst the team members.
  • Risk: research into how negotiating teams operate has shown that as a group, teams of negotiators will generally set higher goals for a negotiation and will take more risks during the negotiation in order to achieve those goals. The flip side to this behavior is that when the stakes grow too large, when they threaten the organization, teams will become more conservative than individual negotiators.

What’s Wrong With Using Teams To Negotiate

Although the advantages of using a team of negotiators to complete a deal is generally a better idea then relying on one single superhuman negotiator, there are some drawbacks to the team approach.

The single greatest drawback to using a team is that it requires a strong leader. You might be scratching your head at this issue, but it is really the heart of most negotiating team problems: poor leadership. The reason that it can be so hard to get a good leader for a negotiating team is because the skill set needed to be a good leader is so large.

Negotiating team leaders need to have several characteristics in order to be successful. In order to accomplish the goals that the team has set for the negotiation, the team leader has to be both flexible and firm. Ultimately the team leader needs to act like a conductor and make sure that the negotiation continues to flow in a direction that will result in a deal being reached. He / she can’t allow it to get hung up on small issues or get lost in a discussion about some issue that is not relevant to reaching a deal.

What All Of This Means For You

Each sales negotiation is unique. It has its own set of challenges and its own opportunities. One of the first decisions that needs to be made is if you’ll approach the negotiations by yourself or with a team of negotiators. More often than not the right answer is going to be to use a team.

A team of negotiators can accomplish much more than a single negotiator can. From such practical issues as being better able to keep track of all of the details of an ongoing negotiation to also being better suited to creating creative solutions to obstacles that pop up, teams are almost always a better approach.

As long as you can supply a skilled negotiating team leader, you should be in good shape. This means that if you want that job, you’ve got some studying to do. Negotiating is hard. Successfully leading a team of negotiators is even harder!

Do you feel more comfortable negotiating by yourself or as part of a team?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Today’s sales negotiation sessions have become so complex that it’s almost too much for a single negotiator to handle. That’s one reason that more and more sales negotiators are being handled by teams of trained negotiators. This simplifies a lot of the record keeping and tactical details of a negotiation; however, it introduces a new layer of complexity – how to manage the negotiating team…

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5 Keys To Sales Negotiation Success

January 15th, 2010
Image Credit You Can Never Have Too Many Sales Negotiating Keys

You Can Never Have Too Many Sales Negotiating Keys

How can you become a better sales negotiator? For such a simple question, there seems to be no corresponding simple answer. I guess that we all know that the best sales negotiators seem to always know what to do and when to do it. Now if there was only some way that we could pick up those same skills! I believe that the right way to reach this level of sales negotiating skill is to develop the same set of skills that the really good negotiators have. I’ve got five of them for you to learn right here…

Things That You Need To Know

Today’s modern cars are wonders of invention. However, they all seem to be so complex with wires, computers, and whatnot. Sales negotiations today are pretty much the same way: they have become much more complex in part because we all have access to so much more information.

In order to deal with the new challenges of today’s sales negotiations, you’re going to need some more tools. Here are five tools that you should have in your toolbox:

  • Two Ears: It’s too bad that these things don’t come with an owner’s guide. Your ears are your single best tool for determining what’s going on with the other side of the table. The best sales negotiators have the ability to listen very carefully and to then focus all of their senses on just what the other side of the table is really trying to say.
  • A Really Big Calendar: All too often I’ve seen sales negotiations go off track because one or more of the teams was too focused only on the short term. The best sales negotiators have the ability to see time for what it really is: the sum of the past, the present, the future, and the really far out future. If you have the ability to see time as one big continuous sliding scale and to understand where the deal that is being negotiated fits on that scale, then you’ll be able to make better decisions.
  • Deal Knowledge: No matter how good of a sales negotiator you are, you still cannot just show up at a negotiation, sit down, and then strike a good deal. You need to have a good understanding of what you have to offer the other side, what they have that you want, as well as the environment in which you are trying to strike a deal. .
  • A Sense Of Humor: As we work hard to improve our sales negotiating skills, this is the one thing that we too easily overlook. It turns out that when the negotiations reach a roadblock, or when tempers flare up, having the skill that allows you to take a step back and say something that gets everyone to laugh is invaluable. Sometimes this is the only thing that can restart a negotiation.
  • The Christmas Spirit: Well, maybe not Christmas itself but at least the ability to both give and take at the negotiating table. If you show up thinking only about what you will be able to squeeze out of the other side of the table, you are in for a long an fruitless negotiation. Likewise, if you are too focused on keeping the other side of the table happy, then you’ll walk away feeling like you did not get a good deal.
  • A Risky Personality: The world that we live in contains risk. Every deal that we negotiate increases the amount of risk in our lives. If we have the type of personality that allows us to deal with this kind of risk, then we can deal with all of the uncertainty that it takes to strike a deal with the other side of the table.

What All Of This Means For You

As they like to say in sales negotiating circles, if you’re not getting better, then you must be getting worse. This really applies to your sales negotiating skills — what have you done lately to acquire the skills that the really good negotiators have?

We’ve discussed five tools that if they aren’t already there, need to be added to your sales negotiating toolbox. Once you have mastered these skills, you’ll be ready to close more deals and close them quicker!

How important do you think a sense of humor is to a sales negotiation: critical, nice to have, or don’t need it?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Don’t you just love movies? Whenever there is a negotiation going on in a movie, be it with hostage takers or closing a big business deal, there is always the picture of the noble solitary sales negotiator doing his / her best to close the deal against almost impossible odds. Can you tell me what is wrong with this picture?

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5 Sales Negotiating Skills For You Should Be Working On Right Now!

January 8th, 2010
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Stamina Is Only One Of The Skills That Every Sales Negotiator Needs

Stamina Is Only One Of The Skills That Every Sales Negotiator Needs

Is it ever too early to talk about planning on what negotiating skills you should working on next? Hopefully not because that’s what I’d like to have chat with you about. In order to be a world-class sales negotiator, you have to master literally 100’s of different skills from learning how to mange your negotiating power, how to prepare for a negotiation, etc. On top of all that, there are five areas that most sales negotiators overlook and yet, they may be the most important negotiating skills that you need to be working on…

The Big Five

    You’re not going to find this list of negotiating skills written down in a book or learn them in a class. They come from that school that we all eventually end up graduating from called the school of hard knocks. Read the list and be thankful that you’re learning them now instead of having to realize what you should have known after a negotiation has gone South:

  • Good Judgement: we would all like to have the ability to make sound decisions. The challenge here is that all too often the only way to develop this skill is by experience and we gain that by making poor judgements. The secret here is to become a careful observer of others: watch the decision that they make and learn from them.
  • Patience: in our 21st Century world this is an amazingly powerful negotiating skill that all too few of us seem to have enough of. I hate to say it, but it seems that the younger the negotiator, the less of this skill there is. If you can develop this skill, then you’ll have the willingness to let any negotiating situation take its time and evolve. Not moving too soon can be a very powerful negotiating tactic.
  • Persistence: people who don’t do a great deal of negotiating often are too willing to give up when they run into resistance. Good sales negotiators realize that opposition from the other side is simply another means of communication and as long as you are talking, there is still hope that an agreement can be reached. Never give up!
  • Stamina: nobody ever gets into the field of sales negotiation because they think that it’s going to be easy. It’s not easy. However, the ability to keep at it and put in the hard work that any negotiation requires is what separates the successful negotiators from the unsuccessful ones.
  • Involvement: at its lowest level, any negotiation is simply a conversation between two people. If you want to have this conversation result in a successful deal, then you’re going to have to go the extra mile and connect with the other side of the table on a personal level. It’s this kind of involvement that makes people feel comfortable saying “yes” to your proposal.

What All Of This Means For You

Nobody is a perfect negotiator. We all have a lot still to learn. You should always be trying to find out what you don’t know so that you’ll know where you need to be spending your time working to become better.

We’ve identified five negotiating skill areas that are all too often overlooked by negotiators. We have a bad habit of always looking for the magic “silver bullet” skill that will allow us to become more successful in our negotiations. It turns out that no such thing exists.

Rather, there’s a whole collection of skills that can provide us with what we need to become better than we are today. Take some time and review this list — now you know what you need to be working on.

Do you think that you are a patient person and do you think that this is a skill that you can only develop as you become older?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How can you become a better sales negotiator? I believe that the right way to reach a higher level of sales negotiating skill is to develop the same set of skills that the really good negotiators have. I’ve got five of them for you to learn right here…

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