It’s still the holiday season and I’m still on vacation!
This is the time of the year that we all make plans for what we want to accomplish in the upcoming year. This time around, take your time and give some thought to what you can do to make this your best year ever…!
Here’s hoping that you’ll have peace, love, happiness, and success in the upcoming year. The blog will be back next week…
- Dr. Jim Anderson
When you hold up a mirror and look into it, what do you see? Do you see a good negotiator? How could you tell if you were looking at one? This is one of those timeless questions that we are always asking ourselves: am I a good negotiator? Well good news, I’ve got the 5 questions that you need to answer in order to resolve this issue once and for all!
Before we dive in and try to ask the questions that need to be asked, let’s start off with an answer. The question that we’ll be answering, of course, is what is the most important skill that a negotiator needs to have?
Lots of people will come up with a wide variety of answers to this question, but in my mind there is really only one answer that rings true: you’ve got to be a good networker. What this means is that you’ve got to be able to get in contact with the people on your team who’s views you’ll be bringing to the table. If you know what they want, then you’ll be an effective negotiator.
Ok, you’ve waited long enough. Here are the five questions that you need to ask yourself in order to find out if you are a good negotiator:
We all want to get better at this skill that we call negotiating. In order to become better, we need to first realize where we need to develop our skills.
These five questions should serve as a great starting point to help you determine where you need some work. Make sure that you answer them honestly — you won’t know where you need to focus your study and training until you have these answers.
Do you think that it is necessary to have a good relationship with EVERYONE on your team in order to be an effective negotiator?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.
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…
Let your mind drift back to the last sales negotiation that you were involved in. When talk finally got around to negotiating a deal, after all of the PowerPoint slide shows, all of the RFP responses, maybe even the product bake-offs, who had the upper hand – you or the other side of the table?
The upper hand in any negotiation is held by the side that has the most power. In sales negotiations, power is a slippery thing. It’s hard to tell how much of it you have and likewise, it’s hard to tell how much of it the other side of the table has. Despite all of this, it’s a critical part of the process – “he who has the most power in a negotiation will probably end up being MORE satisfied by the outcome.”
What all of this means is that you’ve got to get better at evaluating the situation: you’ve got to know how to find out how much power you have and how much the other side has.
Sales people have known for a long time that negotiation is a process of information discovery. During this discovery process you learn what your sources of power for this particular negotiation are. That being said, there are three negotiating rules that will help you to learn more about your power during a negotiation:
These three rules of negotiating power are your ticket to success. At the end of the day, every time that we enter into a negotiation we’re hoping that we come out of it feeling satisfied with what we were able to accomplish – we didn’t give away too much and we got what we needed.
In order to get this type of satisfaction we need to have enough power on our side to enable us to get our way on those things that count.
Realizing that negotiating power is a state of mind and that we have control over how much of it we have will allow us to use it to close better deals and close them quicker.
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.
When you hold up a mirror and look into it, what do you see? Do you see a good negotiator? How could you tell if you were looking at one? This is one of those timeless questions that we are always asking ourselves: am I a good negotiator? Well good news, I’ve got the 5 questions that you need to answer in order to resolve this issue once and for all!
The next time that you are facing a situation that will require a sales negotiation, I’d like to ask you to stop for a moment and consider one important question: should you go it alone or should you bring others from your side along with you?
Although you might think that you know the answer to this question, it just might surprise you to find out that you’re probably wrong. For you see, this really isn’t just one question, but three separate questions that you need to find the answers to…
So there you are, the customer has agreed to meet with you and you know that this is going to be your best opportunity to really roll up your sleeves and hash out a deal with them. Stop. Should you go it alone or should you stack the deck and bring more of your team along with you?
It turns out that this question has been fairly extensively studied and the answer is that you should bring others along . The reasons; however, are not what you may think that they are.
The studies have shown that when we are going to be the sole negotiator, we generally do a really lousy job of preparing to negotiate. Basically we just grab our stuff and go. When we are part of a team that is going to enter into a negotiation, we take more time to coordinate with the rest of the team and we actually do a much better job of preparing for the negotiation.
An additional interesting point is that the more people that you have on your negotiating team, the longer it’s going to take you to close a deal with the other side. This makes sense because when there are multiple people on a negotiating team, they will all have to reach consensus before a deal can be struck. This often results in a much better deal than a single negotiator could have reached.
Sometimes it’s all too easy to picture your next sales negotiation as happening just like they like to show on TV: in a big board room with you on one side of the large polished oak table and the other side opposite you. However, often times reality doesn’t look like this. Instead, you’re there, the other side is there, and then there’s a peanut gallery of various onlookers. Does this change things?
Interestingly enough, this changes things a lot. All sales negotiators (this means you) have a deep-set need for approval. What this means is that we will be highly aware of everyone who is in the room when we are negotiating and we will change our negotiating style simply because they are there.
The biggest impact will be on how we negotiate: we’ll take a much harder line than we would otherwise because we’re showing off. If the other side shows us up or surprises us then we’ll take it badly and we’ll start to throw up walls to resist the other side at every turn.
Likewise, the other side will react the very same way if they feel that we have caused them to “lose face”. This means that you are going to have to be careful how you negotiate when there are others around because your opponent’s behavior will have changed.
If you show up for a sales negotiation and there are more people on the other side of the table than on your side, you will automatically start to feel intimidated. The behavior of the side that has more warm bodies will also change.
Teams of negotiators who have the numerical advantage have been shown to be more willing to make bigger claims for what they and their companies will be able to deliver. Confidence can make us say the darndest things.
My recommendation is that you always try to get a roster of who will be attending a negotiation session before it starts and then make sure that your team is at least equal in numbers to the other side’s. A level playing field always results in a better-balanced deal being struck.
The right time to determine how many people that you need in order to conduct a sales negotiation is before the negotiations start. Your goal should be to make sure that you have the same number of people on your side of the table as the other side has on theirs.
When it comes to making sure that a negotiation is done fairly, I have no problems leveling the playing field before the negotiation start. I’ll request that anyone who is not a part of the actual negotiations leave the room or I’ll ask the other side to kick a few people out in order to balance out the team sizes.
Of course this doesn’t work the other way around. If my negotiating team is larger, then I’ll be very happy to keep my mouth shut and not bring my advantage up. Sometimes silence really is golden.
Do you feel more comfortable going into a negotiation by yourself or with a team? Why?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.
It’s all too easy to get caught up in the theory of negotiating and sometimes we forget to take the time to look around us and see other deals that are being made – and learn from them. If we needed a recent deal to teach us a lesson, the $20 billion dollar Clear Channel private equity buy-out would be a good example — because it almost didn’t happen!
Once upon a time Clear Channel was a high-flying communications company (in the 1990′s). Their stock traded at north of $100 per share. That was then, this is now — their stock has been in the dumpster for a while now and was trading in the low $30′s.
The company decided that what needed to be done is that they needed to go private. No problem with that decision, its just that it takes a whole lotta money to buy up all of those outstanding shares of stock.
This is where various private equity firms and six different Wall Street banks came in. A deal was struck to buy the company for $24.4 billion.
When somebody is getting ready to pay a lot of money for your company, the last thing in the world that you want to have happen is to start having legal problems. That, of course, is exactly what happened: Clear Channel got sued at the same time in two different states.
This of course messed with the value of the company and that made all of the bankers very mad — it was looking like they had agreed to pay too much for the company.
Things got so bad that when Clear Channel’s executives placed calls to the six bankers on the deal, only one of them called back. One of the reasons that the others didn’t call back was that they were afraid that the conversation could get introduced into court proceedings. People who worked on the deal said that the hatred (their word, not mine) got so bad that it was almost palpable.
So how did Clear Channel and the bankers resolve their impasse? Negotiation of course (this blog is called The Accidental Negotiator after all!). How did they do this?
In the end, it all got negotiated. The private-equity firms got the revolving credit from the banks that they believed they needed to make the company a success. The banks got a higher spread on the deal and ended up taking on less debt than they had originally signed up for.
Each of us ends up negotiating every day. It can be easy to get caught up in our own little world and forget to keep our eyes open so that we can see others who are also involved in the negotiation game. It is from them that often we can learn the most.
Clear Channel thought that they had a deal all wrapped up to sell themselves to willing buyers until the credit crunch came along. When the environment changed, along with a couple of lawsuits, the other partners in the deal wanted to make changes.
What started off very badly — anger and resentment were in ample supply, ended up with a new deal getting negotiated. What’s key for us to take away from this event is that having the ability to step back from an emotional deal, focus on what’s really at stake, and then find the courage to move forward is the mark of a great negotiator.
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.
The next time that you are facing a situation that will require a sales negotiation, I’d like to ask you to stop for a moment and consider one important question: should you go it alone or should you bring others from your side along with you?
|
Dr. Jim Anderson’s Twitter RSS Feed
Click Here To Follow Dr. Jim Anderson On Twitter! |
