Posts Tagged ‘planning’

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Just Exactly When Does A Negotiation Start?

Friday, August 13th, 2010
Image Credit
You Can't Win The Race If You Don't Know Where To Start

You Can't Win The Race If You Don't Know Where To Start

While working with one of my sales negotiations students the other day I was asked a great question that I don’t often hear. The student had reported that she was feeling frustrated because she was working on a number of deals and when it came time to negotiate, the actual negotiations seemed to drag on forever. “Isn’t there a better way?” she asked. Turns out that there is…

Start Before You Start

If you want a sales negotiation to go quickly, then you need do everything possible to make the actual negotiation just a formality – work everything out before you sit down at the table. Sound impossible? It’s not.

A negotiation actually starts long before the first negotiation session. Chester Karrass, the godfather of negotiating, believes that it really starts when you first make contact with the other side of the table. What this means is that yes, a negotiation can extend over a very long time; however, that doesn’t mean that the actual process of negotiating needs to be lengthy.

The Power Of The Before Time

All too often, what sales negotiators don’t realize is that every moment of contact with the other side of the table is vitally important. When you are interacting with the other party and the negotiations have not formally started, this is exactly when the most valuable information can be learned.

If you are the one doing the buying in a sales negotiation, then this is the time that you can observe the salesperson on the other side. You make casual inquiries into such critical items as how they price their products, who has already bought the product, how the salespersons year is going, where they rank in their organization, etc.

This pre-negotiation time is just as valuable if you are trying to sell something in a sales negotiation. You can determine if this is the right person that you should be talking with, how much they have to spend as well as who really controls the money.

The Gift Of Gab

One of the most important things that you can use the early encounter time to do is to create a relationship with the other side. Ultimately, during any sales negotiation there will be a certain amount of tension on both sides of the table.

If you’ve been able to use your pre-negotiation contact time to develop a relationship with the other side of the table, then you’ll be able to quickly diffuse any stressful situations that pop up.

What All Of This Means For You

Novice sales negotiators don’t realize that a sales negotiation really starts long before either side sits down at the negotiating table. The process of reaching a deal really starts when the first contact is made.

Using the informal interaction time to explore where the other side of the table is coming from is a great way to use this opportunity. Taking the time to build a relationship with the other side will also pay dividends later on in the process.

Smart sales negotiators use all of the time that they have to move closer to reaching a successful agreement. They know that the time before negotiations start is very valuable and if used correctly, then they can make the outcome of the negotiations a foregone conclusion…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™

Question For You: What do you think that your #1 goal should be when you first meet the other side?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In the world of negotiating, we all love the idea of getting to win-win. Walking away from our next sales negotiation with the feeling that not only did we get a great deal, but that we left the other side feeling the same way is every negotiator’s dream. It turns out that if this is how you want to have things turn out, then you’ve got to do some planning before the negotiations start in order to make it happen…

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Remember: “Negotiation” Spelled Backwards Is “Change”

Friday, July 2nd, 2010
Image Credit Sorry -- There's No Way To Calculate How A Negotiation Will Go

Sorry -- There's No Way To Calculate How A Negotiation Will Go

So what’s the secret to conducting a successful negotiation? Is it taking enough time to plan? Is it picking the right place to hold the negotiations? Turns out that none of these are the right answer. Instead, if you want to be successful you need to do one simple thing: plan for everything to go wrong.

The Power Of A Good Plan (Not!)

Now I don’t want you to get me wrong here, but I’ve got some news for you that just might come as a surprise to you. Yes, it is important to plan out each of your negotiations. You want to take the time to do your homework, identify what the other side is really going to be looking for, and come up with a plan that you think is going to allow you to get what you want out of the negotiation.
Umm, this is where things get just a bit awkward – for you see, that plan is never going to work out. What none of us take into consideration (not like we can) is just exactly what the other side of the table is going to be doing during the negotiation. In a nutshell, they are going to be actively working against us. They are going to be trying to foil our every attempt to get an upper hand during the negotiation.
Ultimately what this means is that the carefully laid out plan that you had come up with before the negotiations started will very quickly turn into junk due to changes in circumstances. Dang it – why can’t the other side just do what you want them to do?

Your Defense Against Changes: Part 1

The fact that the other side of the table is going to be actively working against you really should come as no surprise to you. Hey, you’re basically doing the same thing to them! What you need here is a way to defend your carefully laid out plan against their crafty ways.
The concept of how you need to prepare to do battle to save your plan is actually pretty simple – the execution is another story. What you are going to want to do is to sit down with a colleague prior to the negotiation and do some role-playing.
You will, of course, want to play you. You’ll need your partner to play the other side of the table. What you want them to do is to frustrate your every move. You really want them to require you to do two things simultaneously: defend the positions that you are laying down and resist their clever arguments / positions.
You’re going to hate doing this. However, it really is the best way to discover where your arguments are weak and how you’re going to need to do a better job of resisting the other side’s proposals.

Your Defense Against Changes: Part 2

What’s a sales negotiator to do when the other side does something that makes their game plan completely moot? The worst thing that you can do is to continue to negotiate without a plan.
What you do need to do is to stop the proceedings. Call for a break. Ask for a timeout. Just do something to cause the negotiations to come to a halt. Give yourself some time to think about what’s just happened.
This is the time that you’re going to have use to come up with a new plan very quickly. The ability to adjust to changing negotiating circumstances and to adjust your strategy to meet the new reality is the mark of a great sales negotiator.

What All Of This Means For You

Planning is the right way to prepare for your next sales negotiation. However, professional negotiators will tell you that no matter how carefully you plan, you are going to discover that your plan will very quickly become out of date.
What you need to do is to work with a partner when you are preparing for a negotiation. That partner needs to attack your positions and offer their own positions that you need to find ways to push back against. It’s tough work but it will prepare you for the battle that lies ahead.
Remembering that you will need time during the negotiation to regroup and create new plans is critical. Remember, a sales negotiation is not a race to get to the end, but rather much more like a dance where how you conduct yourself during the negotiation will determine what your final score is.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that it is even worth it to create a plan if it’s just going to get tossed out the window early on?

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

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5 Steps For Preparing For Your Next Sales Negotiation

Friday, June 11th, 2010
Image Credit A Plan Is What You Need To Have BEFORE You Start A Negotiation

A Plan Is What You Need To Have BEFORE You Start A Negotiation

So let’s say that you were going to drive to some place far, far away. Let’s go a step farther and say that you sorta knew where you were going to go to, but that you had never been there before. Can you imagine yourself just jumping into the car and driving with doing any planning? Believe it or not, this is exactly how some sales negotiators jump into a negotiation.

What, Me Plan?

So how would you get ready for that long car ride? I’m betting that you’d fill up the gas tank. You might check the air in the tires. Probably you’d pack some food and bring along some tapes / CDs to listen to. You might even go so far as to get a map (or these days a GPS system) and figure out how you were going to get from here to there.

It turns out that the same set of basic steps need to be taken by a sales negotiator before starting any negotiation. During a car trip you sure don’t want to run out of gas, go hungry, or lose your way. The same can be said of a sales negotiation.

5 Things You Have To Do Before You Start Any Negotiation

To help get you properly prepared for your next sales negotiation, I’ve got some suggestions. Here are five steps that you need to take before you sit down at the negotiating table:

  • Create A “Want” List: How can you be successful during a negotiation if you don’t know what you want? Take the time to create a list of what you want to get out of the negotiation. Be careful here: not all wants are created the same. Make sure that you distinguish between the ones that you can’t live without and the ones that would just be nice to have.
  • Pick A Start And An End Point: Before you start any negotiation, you can pretty much identify the main issues that will be coming up during the negotiation. Take the time to determine what your starting offer is going to be for each of these points. Many negotiators do this step and then forget to do the next part – make up your mind as to where you are going to be willing to end up on this point.
  • Deal With “No”: Arguably the word “no” is one of the most powerful words in the English language and it can stop any sales negotiator in his / her tracks if you aren’t prepared for it. Before the negotiation starts you need to assume that the other side is going to say “no” to every proposal that you make. Knowing this, you need to decide in advance how you are going to react when they say it.
  • Pick Your “Gets”: It’s a fact of life during any negotiation that you’re going to have to give in on some points. Knowing that this will happen, before the negotiation you need to make a list of what you’re going to get from the other side when you make a concession to them.
  • Set The Scene: All too often it’s after a negotiation has started that a negotiator discovers that where and when the negotiation is happening is not in their best interests. Take some time before the negotiation is even scheduled to pick where and when you want it to happen – make sure that it’s easy for you to get to (and to leave) and that it works with your schedule.

What All Of This Means For You

There’s probably not a sales negotiator out there that won’t agree that taking the time to do a good job of planning is a key factor in determining how a negotiation comes out. However, all too often we just don’t do this well.

It turns out that there are a sequence of planning steps that you need to perform before every negotiation. By doing these steps, you’ll be cool, calm, and collected when things happen during the negotiation and you can keep your focus on what matters the most – getting the best deal!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Help For Technical Staff

Question For You: What do you think the best way to remember all of the different things that you want to get out of a negotiation is? Put them on a piece of paper on the table in front of you?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever wished for three wishes? Maybe you’d keep one of these wishes in you back pocket and then someday when you found yourself in the middle of a sales negotiation that just wasn’t going your way, you could whip it out and come out a winner? Well, I don’t have any wishes to share with you, but I’ve got some ways for you to come out of your next negotiation feeling like you won it before you even started…

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Deadly Sins Of Sales Negotiations: Hope And 3 Others

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

When Playing The Sales Negotiation Game, You Can't Just Hope To Win<br><a href=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?

The 4 Deadly Sins Of Sales Negotiations

It turns out that the reason that so many sales negotiations turn out poorly for negotiators is because they enter into the negotiations with the wrong state of mind. Instead of preparing for the negotiation, they go in with a “let’s hope for the best” type of mindset. How can they possibly hope to do well?

Sales negotiators who have this type of mind set more often than not don’t do well during a negotiation. They fall prey to the four deadly sins of sales negotiations:

  1. No plan
  2. Bad agreements
  3. Poor reading skills
  4. No follow up

Your Plan Is That You Have No Plan!

While I worked for Siemens, there was a large French-Canadian director who would occasionally explode in strategy meetings and shout at people that “Your Plan Is That You Have No Plan!” In a sales negotiation, this is often the case when people enter into the negotiation without a plan.

Instead of a plan, they have hope. Hope that things will go well. That they won’t make too many mistakes. That the other side will make mistakes. A sales negotiation is a journey, not a destination. You need to have a plan (concessions, demands, questions, schedules, etc.) for how you are going to get to where you want to go.

Agreement Without Clarity

During everyday conversations with friends and coworkers, we all have a tendency to agree to things that we may not have a full understanding of. This is a polite way of keeping the conversation going even when we may not fully grasp what they are saying – we figure that we can pick it up later on.

This same type of behavior during a sales negotiation can be disastrous. If you don’t take the time to fully understand what you are agreeing to, you may find yourself quickly in a bad situation. Call for a break, take a time out, or ask the other side of the table to better explain something before you agree to it.

Doing A Poor Job Of Reading

Looking the other side in the eye and signing a contract with a big flourish sure can make a strong impression – that you don’t have any idea what you are really signing. I learned a long time ago that he who takes the notes, ultimately controls how a meeting turns out. The same goes for sales negotiations – it really doesn’t matter what you THINK you’ve agreed to, it’s the words that make it onto the paper that really matter. Take the time to read them!

Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up!

It’s too easy to think that a sales negotiation is over and done with once the last paper has been signed and the handshakes have been exchanged. However, both sides of the table have a responsibility to follow up and make sure that the agreement is being executed by both sides. Not only is this a critical part of doing business, it can have a big impact on any future negotiations between the two sides.

Final Thoughts

A long time ago I took a scuba diving class. One of the key lessons that they taught in that class was the simple phrase “Plan your dive, dive your plan.” The same thing can be said about sales negotiations: you need to have a plan and you need to follow it if you want to have any chance of being successful.

We now know what can happen if you don’t have a plan: you’ll end up skipping ove important steps like agreeing to things that aren’t clear, not reading things that you are signing, and not following up after the deal is done. Remembering to plan your negotiations ahead of time and avoiding the 4 deadly sins of sales negotiations will allow you to close better deals and close them quicker.

Questions For You

Have you ever gone into a sales negotiation without having a good plan? Did you end up agreeing to things that perhaps you didn’t fully understand because you didn’t know what you were looking for? Did you fully read the contract before you signed it? Did you remember to follow up to make sure that the contract was being followed after it was signed? 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.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

My daughter is currently learning about how to add fractions in school. The trick to doing this right is that you have to make sure that the denominator (the number on the bottom of the fraction) is the same for both numbers before you add them. She’s struggling with this concept and it reminds me of a key sales negotiating point – never try to do a deal using funny money.

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Don’t Believe What Anyone Says Is What Sales Negotiators Need To Learn To Do

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Sales Negotiators Need To Know When To Hold The Truth - And When To Fold

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.

What’s Going On Here – Can’t Anyone Tell The Truth?

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!

Where Do The LInes Get Drawn?

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.

One Word – Be Skeptical

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.

Final Thoughts

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.

Questions For You

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.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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?

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