Sales Negotiators Need To Know When To Hold The Truth - And When To Fold
People are either honest or they aren’t right? Umm, well not exactly. Look, in a sales negotiation everything is not as it seems. I hate to use strong words like “lying” or anything like that, but let’s just say that a healthy dose of skepticism is often a sales negotiator’s best friend.
The older a sales negotiator gets, the more he / she is less likely to believe just about ANYTHING that they are told. There is a reason for this! In the end, sales negotiating is all about power – who has it and who doesn’t. However, just like in the game of poker bluffing is not only allowed, it is often encouraged.
If you don’t believe me (or you don’t WANT to believe me), then think about how a buyer and a seller interact when they are trying to complete a deal to buy a house – talk about some serious poker playing!
We are in a very murky area here and it’s very easy for a sales negotiator to stumble over the line and fall into the dark side – becoming a flat-out lier. It’s necessary that you operate here, but you’ve got to watch your step.
Our house buyer / seller are going to be presenting information that may not quite be the complete truth. The house seller is going to be talking about all of the things that make the house a fantastic house – and leaving out any discussion about the leaky pipes in the basement and the squirrels that have set up a home in the attic.
Likewise the buyer is going to be trying to mask any real interest that he / she may have in buying this particular house. Additionally, the buyer will be working hard to NOT communicate how much funding he / she has to complete the purchase. Is anyone lying here? No – but they are also not telling the complete truth.
A good sales negotiator is ALWAYS skeptical about anything that he / she is told by the other side. This includes when the other side uses facts & figures (where did they come from?), experts (what makes them an expert?), and handsome bound color documents (Kinko’s can turn out great stuff overnight).
As a sales negotiator your job is to always be asking questions. Take nothing at face value and always assume that the other side is probably not giving you the complete story. This is how you are are going to transfer power from the other side to you.
Being a “doubting Thomas” is a great skill for a sales negotiator to have. One important rule of life has been give to us by the Las Vegas board of tourism: “What happens during a Sales Negotiation, stays in the negotiation.” This means that you can’t have any hard feelings about what information the other side revealed (or didn’t) during the negotiation after it is all over and done. Having a healthy dose of doubt while negotiating will allow you to close better deals and close them quicker.
Have you ever accepted anything that the other side has told you at face value during a sales negotiation? Did it turn out to be completely true? Have you ever been fooled by the other side? Have you ever stretched the truth during a sales negotiation? How did the other side use the information that you gave them? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
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We all hear so much about the smooth Donald Trumps of the world that we can fall in to the belief that everyone shows up for a sales negotiation better prepared than we are. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there are four common sales negotiation mistakes that even really smart people make all the time. Are you making any of them?
Negotiation is all about power. The trick to walking away from a sales negotiation feeling satisfied about what you were able to achieve is to make sure that you walk IN to the negotiation with more negotiating power than the other side has. Sounds easy doesn’t it? I’ve been amazed over and over again to see sales negotiators just give away their negotiating power to the other side time after time. They just don’t realize that they are doing it. Let’s see if we can put a stop to this…
Negotiating power can be a be a funny thing. You can have a lot of it and not even know it. Likewise, you can give it away and not be aware that you are doing so. There are a lot of ways to lose power but the #1 way is for you to run your mouth too much. Ultimately negotiating power is all about having more information. Whichever side of the table has more information about the other side has the power. Information can be used against you, so you want to hold on to it as tightly as possible.
If only it was as easy as keeping your mouth shut! Nope, there are actually a number of things that you can do in order to ensure that you keep the upper hand when it comes to negotiating power during you next sales negotiation:
Things that we can’t see are hard for most of us to get our hands around. Power in a sales negotiation is one of these things – it can be hard to tell how much of it you have and if you’ve lost some of it. Remembering to keep your mouth closed and working with your team to make sure that they do the same thing will allow you to close better deals and close them quicker.
Have you ever been in a sales negotiation when the other side revealed something that gave you power? Have you ever made a slip and given power to the other side because of something that you said? Has your team ever said something that weakened your position? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking. Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.
People are either honest or they aren’t right? Umm, well not exactly. Look, in a sales negotiation everything is not as it seems. I hate to use strong words like “lying” or anything like that, but let’s just say that a healthy dose of skepticism is often a sales negotiator’s best friend…
Email Is A Powerful Tool, But Is It The Right Tool For Sales Negotiations?
I might be setting off a bit of a firestorm with this idea, but here in the 21st Century do you think that it is possible to conduct sales negotiations using more smart phones and less human contact?
The #1 attraction of using a smart phone (Blackberry, iPhone, or whatever) in the first place is that it can speed just about anything up. The immediacy of e-communications allows deals to develop quicker and to move at speeds that once were unimaginable. However, when it comes to sales negotiations, things can get a bit trickier.
What we are all just starting to deal with here are the questions that come up surrounding e-mail negotiations. Some of these questions include:
Using email as a central part of any sales negotiation changes a number of things. The first is that anything that you put into an email will live forever and may come back to haunt you. It is a great way to send information to the other side, keep almost perfect records, and make sure that everyone involved is informed on where things stand.
At the same time there are pitfalls that everyone must be aware of. These tend to show up whenever there are conflicts or misunderstands. The problems come about because the one thing that email does not do well is communicate emotions or nuances.
So what are the “new rules” in this world of email supported sales negotiations? Here are a few of them:
The take-away from all of this is that times are changing. Gone are the days that all sales negotiations could take place face to face. Negotiating via email is here to stay and we all need to get used to the new rules of the game.
The experts who have been living with this new way of doing business have one final suggestion for all of us. They recommend that prior to starting the negotiating process, all parties meet in person. This is the key to allowing everyone to understand their body language and how they react to things. In the end, this is critical so that you can understand the true intent behind the words in their emails.
Do you negotiate via email today? Has there ever been a miscommunication caused by email? What caused the problem? How was it resolved? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
Winning Means Everything In Sports, In Sales Negotiations It Means Something Else...
What does it mean to “win” a sales negotiation? This sure looks like a simple question doesn’t it? I think that in our minds, we all know what we think winning looks like – after all, we see it in sports all the time. However, things are just a bit different when it comes to sales negotiations…
In sports, winning sometimes is achieved by a blowout - the football game that ends up 60 – 0, the no-hitter in baseball, etc. What’s interesting is that although these are clear victories for one team, the viewers get bored quickly and turn off the game – why bother if you already know who’s going to win. A lot of Superbowl games have been like this.
It turns out that sales good negotiations are a lot more like sports games that are too close to call right up until the last moment.
Dr. Chester Karrass goes about defining a sales negotiation winner as being someone who “.. understands what his or her objectives are and takes the time to achieve what is possible through the bargaining process.”
The interesting thing here is that “getting the lowest / highest price” is nowhere to be found in this definition – I think that that speaks volumes. During a sports competition, nobody spends any time worrying about what they can do to make a better deal for the other side. However, during a sales negotiation, this can be critical because you’re going to be dealing with the other side in the future and this negotiation is just the start.
Finally, one of the keys to being a successful sales negotiator is to make sure that the other side ends up being satisfied with the final deal that you reach. Unlike sports, it’s not over once the deal has been inked. The other side still needs to deliver on their promises and you want them to be happy to do so – not unhappy and looking for ways to cut corners in order to make back some of what they feel that they’ve lost!
When you negotiate deals, do you spend time before hand planning how you want the negotiation to go? Do you spend enough time? Do you worry about how the other side is going to feel once the negotiations are done? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.
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