The Accidental Negotiator » sales

The Delicate Art Of Using Persuasion In Negotiations

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:23:00 +0000

So why do we even bother negotiating with the other side? The answer is simple: we need the other side do or provide us with what we want. Study after study has shown that most people (this includes me) believe that we’re so smart that nobody can sell anything to us. Good negotiators know that the truth turns out to be that we can be persuaded to do something if, and only if, we don’t recognize that the other side is using a “sales” technique on us. Why should this matter to you? Simple – when you are negotiating with the other side and you take the time to use a few persuasion techniques then you will be taking advantage of what modern psychological research has revealed about how we can make our ideas and negotiating positions more credible and more believable. Let’s talk about how you can accomplish this…

Use a rifle, not a shotgun: If you want the other side to accept your ideas and make them their own, you need to aim at a narrow target. This means that you need to stop doing what we all instinctively do during a negotiation: back the truck up and dump all of the information that we’ve collected about our position all over the other side. It turns out that this will just end up overwhelming them and not do much to bring them over to our side. Instead, what you should do is some field work before you even start to negotiate. You need to find out what’s important to the other side. This will allow you to focus your persuasion on those and only those points.

Make It Story Time: Stories are a fantastic way for us to learn and they can be very effective way to persuade someone. However, if it sounds like you are giving a sales pitch, then you can be assured that telling a story won’t work. Instead, if you focus on a story that has real meaning, then the other side’s unconscious mind will automatically draw the necessary connections without any help from you and the result will be that they end up doing the persuasion for you. The key to telling an effective story is to once again pinpoint what matters to the other side and then tell a story about a similar idea or concept. This indirect approach is the secret to winning the other side over to your way of thinking and keeps them from feeling like you are using a hard sell technique on them.

How have you won the other side over in the past? Have you ever tried something that did not work out the way that you had intended? Has someone tried to persuade you to do something with a story during a negotiation but blown it by turning it into an obvious sell job? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: persuasion, sales, selling, stories

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Testing The Waters: Does The Other Side Really Mean That?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:12:00 +0000

Just a little over 20 years ago, I found myself in the middle-east on a business trip. The folks that I was traveling with decided to go down to the bazaar after dinner to see what was available. While shopping I happened upon an old man who was selling (fake) Rolexs. When I asked him how much one was, he told me $20. As I reached into my pocket to pay him, one of my traveling companions stopped me and in a quiet voice said “He doesn’t really mean it, negotiate with him.” It turns out that he was right – I ended up getting the watch for $10. Just in case you are wondering, yes, it does not pay to purchase fakes because that watch stopped working two weeks later.

This same situation often happens during business negotiations. The other side will state that one of their positions such as a firm price or position is non-negotiable. What do you do now? The last thing that you want to have happen is for the negotiations to end badly. You’ve got to find out if this is really the case or if they are just saying that as part of their negotiating strategy. The WRONG thing to do is to charge right at them and offer them a lower price / different position.

Instead, what you want to do is to “test” just how firm the other side’s position is. Just because they say that it’s immovable, doesn’t mean that it really is. Testing means that you need to change the nature of the deal. Take the firm item and add some additional pieces to it. Change the quantities that you are talking about. Change the delivery time: make it longer or shorter. What you want to do is to mix in items that are not fixed with the ones that are fixed and then go back and negotiate the bottom line. What you may find out is that what was once fixed, is no longer so!

Now this is not the only approach that you can take. Depending on how the negotiations are proceeding, there are four alternative steps that you could take:

Try walking out – this may make them chase after you and offer to revisit their “firm” position.
Charge on and keep on talking as though you never heard them state that it was a firm position. Note that this approach is extremely dangerous if they call you on it.
Protest to a higher power – bring the other side’s boss into the negotiation and complain. Once again this can be dangerous if the boss is the one who told them that the point was firm.
Finally, reduce the size of the deal being discussed by determining if there are some things that you can do yourself.

So what do you think – is there ever a case where something is really, really, firm and non-negotiable? Have you tried any of my suggestions in the past and did they work for you? Even better, has anyone tried to get around one of your firm points during a negotiation?

Tags: deals, sales, strategy, firm position, non-negotiable, how to deal

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Three Secrets That Have Been Missing From Negotiation Training

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:11:00 +0000

This is going to be a bit of a rant, so I should probably apologize for that in advance.

Over the past 10 years I have have read countless books on negotiating, attended training course after training course, and in the end I was left feeling that something very fundamental was missing — there were secrets to being being a successful negotiator that weren’t being talked about. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing that you don’t know something. I knew that I needed to find somebody who knew these secrets and who would be willing to share them with me.

When in doubt, talk to Sales. So that’s what I did – I started going out on customer visits with every salesperson that would let me tag along. What I saw was that there were good sales people and bad sales people. The good sales people would dive into a negotiation with a customer, tussle about the details, and in the end they would emerge with an agreement that was good for their company and with a satisfied customer no matter what they had gotten or given up. The bad sales people would enter a negotiation as though they were jumping into a street fight, have a knock-down-drag-out with the customer, and finally emerge bruised with a bad agreement and an angry customer. So what were they doing differently?

The bad sales people had clearly gone to the same negotiating classes that I had attended. They used the same negotiating vocabulary that I used and they stepped though a negotiation using the basic steps that I was currently using. They couldn’t really teach me anything. It was the good sales people who held the negotiating secrets that I was looking for.

As I focused on what the good sales people were doing, it very slowly dawned on me that they were being successful because of things that they were doing that weren’t taught in any negotiating course that I had ever taken. This clearly called for some serious beer conversations in order to gain access to these secrets.

Over way too many beers, I was eventually able to tease the answers out of the really good sales people about how they were so successful in negotiating with their customers. At a very high level, what they told me was that I had been missing the other side of the negotiation coin: persuasion. What they said is that negotiating is basically convincing someone to do something. What the bad sales people are missing is the other half of the process: persuading the customer that this is what they want. In fact, if you are good at persuasion then the customer will be falling all over themselves to buy what you have.

As I took all of this in, it started to become clear that what the good sales people were doing could be broken into three main sets of skills:

Rapport: they developed a sense of bonding with their customers that allowed the customers to treat them not like “the other side of the table”, but rather like an old friend that they were meeting once again.
Body Language: just like a cheerleader, the good sales people realized that in addition to the words that were coming out of their mouths, their bodies were also talking to the customer and they made sure that what their bodies were saying matched what their mouths were saying.
Knowing What To Say & When To Say It: the bad sales people always seemed to have periods of awkward silence when they met with customers. The good sales people, on the other hand, always seemed to have something to say and it always seemed to get a positive response out of the customer.

There is a lot more to this persuasion stuff and we’ll talk more about it. However, for now understand that even if you think that you know everything about negotiating, if you don’t have the persuasion skills that you need, then you still have a lot to learn!

Tags: negotiation, persuasion , deals, sales, success

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Make More Sales: Understanding Buyer Power & What To Do About It

Dr. Jim Anderson — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:16:00 +0000

So you want to sell something (perhaps yourself for a new job?) and you feel that the other side (the buyer) has all the power. Ok, you’re right – just give up and stop reading right now.

Hmm, you’re still reading. Perhaps although it looks like the buyer has all the power, this really is not the case. Let’s take a careful look at what is really going on here and perhaps we can boost your self confidence just a bit.

First a quick review is probably called for. In negotiating, power is all in your head. We imagine that there are many sources of power and they can be based on resources, regulations, laws, or even psychological factors. In the end, we all have different views of just exactly what power means. Most of these views only exist in our heads and they form a critical part of what can be called our inner reality.

Given all that, what can we as a seller in a negotiation do to minimize the buyer’s power while maximizing our own? Let’s take a look at common sources of power and see how we can gain the upper hand:

Organizational Time: the buyer may be under the gun because he/she needs what we have to sell in order to meet a demand that his organization is putting on him: “Fill that position NOW!”
Personal Time: the buyer may have poor time management skills and has painted himself into a corner so that he needs to make a purchase NOW!
Specifications: the product that you are offering (yes, even if it’s just you) may be the only one that fits the requirements that he’s trying to fill.
Location: the closer your product is to where the customer needs it to be the better.
Re-Validation: does the buyer have the time/energy/budget to re-validate another supplier if he doesn’t select your product?
Warranty: does your product come with a better warranty than any other offers that the buyer has?

In any negotiating situation not all of these sources of power are going to be valid. However, I’m willing to bet you that at least some of them will be. If you spend just a bit of time thinking about it before you enter into a situation where you are going to be selling something, I think that you’ll find that you really have much more power than you thought that you did!

Tags: sales, deals, buyer, power, planning

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You Want A Bargain? Learn How Other Cultures Barter

Dr. Jim Anderson — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:37:00 +0000

Although we pride ourselves on living in modern times, the art of negotiating is an ancient skill that our relatives who lived in more humble times probably did better than we do. Don’t despair — there’s no need to feel like a dummy! What your ancestors once knew can be quickly relearned! (plus you already know how to prepare to start to negotiate)

There are three negotiating skills that your grandfather’s grandfather used every time he ventured to market:

Always leave yourself room to negotiate (& grant concessions): When trying to buy something, consider the price that is advertised for anything as simply a starting point no matter if it’s vegetables in the market or a giant wide-screen TV. Whatever you first propose as a price that you’d be willing to pay, make sure that the gap between it and the advertised price is great enough that you’ve got plenty of room left with to negotiate in. The flip side to this rule is that your starting price needs to be high enough so that it does not appear to be insulting.
Concede Slowly: In every negotiation, you will end up giving some things away — that is the very nature of negotiations. What’s really important is how fast you give it away! The slower you are to give in on various points, the more time you’ll have to get what you want out of the negotiations.
Ask For Something In Return When You Make A Concession: As silly as it sounds, this is actually very important. If when you make a concession you don’t ask for something, then the other side is going to end up feeling dissatisfied. They are going to feel as though it was too easy for you to give up what you offered. So instead, make sure that every agreement that the other side drags out of you has something that you get from them. Once again note that what you get does not have to have an equivalent value.

There you go! Armed with these three trusty guides you are once again ready to do your family proud the next time you venture to the market.

Tags: deals, money, sales, satisfaction, how to deal

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