Posts Tagged ‘sales’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

3 Secrets Successful Sales Negotiators Use To Win

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
3 Secrets That Top Sales Negotiators Know

3 Secrets That Top Sales Negotiators Know

Ok, so I’ll be the first to admit it – I used the forbidden word “win” in the title. In sales negotiations we prefer to not say “win” because it implies that there is also a “loser”. and that’s not a good thing. How about if we try something like “3 secrets to always walking away feeling successful“?

It’s All About Patterns

Successful sales negotiators are good at what they do because they know what they are doing. That being said, they also have developed patterns for conducting sales negotiations that serve them well. If you want to improve how your sales negotiations turn out, then taking the time to study these patterns will help move you towards your goal.

The 3 Secrets

  1. Control Your Location & Time: Just like most sports teams, the sales negotiator who conducts a negotiation on his / her home turf tends to do better. Negotiating at your base of operations makes life easier – you have better access to information and people and you spend less time searching for things that you need to complete the deal. Additionally, although there is no one perfect time to conduct sales negotiations, every deal has its own best time. Late on Fridays can often be a powerful time to close a deal quickly!
  2. Understand Your B.A.T.A.N.A?: Before you start any sales negotiation, you need to make sure that you have a good understanding of what your Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement (BATANA) is. If the talks break down, what will your next action be? Knowing this in advance gives you more power while you are negotiating.
  3. Start High, Give In Slowly: If you are negotiating to sell something, you need to plan the negotiation in advance. This means setting your price high enough so that you have room to allow the other side to “bring you down”. During every negotiation, you will have to make  concessions to the other side. Studies have shown that sales negotiators who make their concessions in smaller increments seem to end up doing better.

Next Steps

The art of sales negotiations does not have one magic “sliver bullet” that suddenly transforms an average sales negotiator into a top-notch sales negotiator. Instead, there are a 1,000 negotiating skills that provide the scaffolding that we all need in order to climb to the next level negotiating. Get this right and you’ll be well on your way to being able to close better deals and close them quicker.
Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

Questions For You

Have you ever had to conduct a sales negotiation in a location that was less than ideal for you? How did that deal turn out? What was the best time that you ever conducted a sales negotiation? What was the worst? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Wouldn’t it be great if the best sales negotiators in the world could drop by our place and sit down with us for awhile to share what they’ve learned? If you knew that they were coming, what questions would you ask them?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in negotiation skills | No Comments »

The Difference Between Sports And Sales Negotiation: Winning

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Winning Means Everything In Sports, In Sales Negotiations It Means Something Else...

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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized, winning | 1 Comment »

Sales Negotiators Say The Strangest Things

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
Sales Negotiations Have To Be Documented In A Way That Both Sides Understand

Sales Negotiations Have To Be Documented In A Way That Both Sides Understand

Although I had intended to write this posting about how we need to be careful when we are documenting sales negotiations with people from other countries, I slowly realized that we need to be just as careful with folks who were brought up in the same country as us.

So what’s the big deal about words – can’t people just speak clearly and let it be that? As long as you don’t use long fancy words, won’t everyone understand what you mean? It turns out that the answer is no.

I think one of the best examples of this was set by the professional negotiators who brokered the 1979 peace accord between Israel and Egypt. After everyone had finally verbally agreed to all of the terms, the papers documenting the agreement were drawn up. However, there wasn’t just one set of papers. Rather, there were four.

All of the agreements were documented in four different languages: Egyptian, Hebrew, English, and French. Even more importantly, all of the parties involved agreed that if there was a dispute, then the French version would be the binding version. Words can have completely different meanings in different cultures.

The negotiating expert Dr. Chester Karrass has kept track of how different cultures attempt to communicate an idea and somehow end up making mistakes. My favorite one from his list is the sign that he saw in a hotel in Egypt that read “Patrons need have no anxiety about the water, it has been passed by management.”

In closing, just because you’ve reached the end of a sales negotiation with the other side of the table, you must still be on guard. Your verbal agreements now have to be documented and both parties need to read and interpret the words in the same way. Your work is by no means done, it is only just starting!

Have you ever negotiated with someone who spoke a different language than you did? Were you able to finally reach a verbal agreement with them? What language did you use to document your agreements in? Were there ever any interpretation issues that arose because of language differences? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Contracts | No Comments »

Tips From The Middle East For Sales Negotiators

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
The People Of The Middle East Have Always Been Sales Negotiation Experts

The People Of The Middle East Have Always Been Sales Negotiation Experts

They say that the world is getting smaller every day. This may be true, but the people who live in this smaller world couldn’t be more different than they are! A case in point are the  sales negotiators who hail from the Middle East – Arabs if you will. Unlike us in the West who become uptight at the mere thought of entering into a negotiation, they actually look forward to negations – it’s fun!

There is a lot going on behind the scenes here. Not the least of which is that negotiating has been a key part of Arab culture since days in which the very first trade routes wound their way through the Middle East connecting Europe to the Orient. They’ve gotten to be quite good at this skill and it shows when you negotiate with them.

One thing that Westerners need to understand when entering into negotiations with Arabs is that bargaining is a very social activity for them. You’ll find that you will be greeted warmly and food and drink are often provided in generous quantities. This can throw a Western sales negotiator off because you’ll start to feel as though you are at a dinner party instead of a sales negotiation.

Arabs also have a different view of time than those from the West. In part because they enjoy the sales negotiation process nothing will be rushed. You’ll find that there are many breaks, many side discussions, and frequent interruptions.

These interruptions may include visits from people not involved in the sales negotiations. They may come and go multiple times. Just let it happen. You need to keep your calm and realize that you are playing the same sales negotiation game, just at a different table.

Finally, you need to realize that Arabs don’t really worry about deadlocks. They have no problems walking away from a sales negotiation and then coming back to it later on. They always hope to eventually do a deal, but they realize that sometimes this is not possible.

Have you ever had a chance to participate in a sales negotiation when the other side of the table was from the Middle East? Did they seem to enjoy the sales negotiation process? Was time a factor? Did you ever encounter a deadlock? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in how to negotiate | No Comments »

The Chinese Guide To Sales Negotiation

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Sales Negotiators Need To Learn How To Negotiate With The Chinese

Sales Negotiators Need To Learn How To Negotiate With The Chinese

Pity the poor American salesperson who goes out into the world of business and tries to negotiate. Sure, he/she is probably well equipped to negotiate with his / her American born-and-breed peers. I mean, after all, we share the same vocabulary, culture, and were brought up pretty much the same way. However, what happens when we encounter someone from a different (dare I say foreign?) culture? Like say, China…?

The world is constantly becoming a smaller and smaller place. Current economic conditions not withstanding, this is only going to speed up over time. That means that somehow we need to find a way to quickly come up to speed on how to deal with sales negotiators who come from different cultures. They think and act completely differently than we do and we are the ones who need to learn to adjust in order to make our sales negotiations successful.

Dr. Charles Karrass has spent a lot of time studying not only negotiations but also how cross-cultural negations do or don’t work. When it comes to dealing with folks from China, he’s got some suggestions for us:

  • Get Some Quanxi: Quanxi is the Chinese term for the construction of close family relations, or a joined network of relationships with the emphasis on the individual and informal groups rather than formal organizations. Building guanxi means building relationships. In sales negotiations, this means that by entering into a negotiated relationship, you are actually taking on a lot of responsibility. If things change during the contract, the other side can ask for changes and you are expected to be accommodating.
  • Watch Those Words: In negotiations with Chinese, what a word means is critically important. All too often, what a word means to you may not be what it means to the other side. Both before and during a negotiation, it would be worth your while to take the time to carefully define key words and make sure that both of you are using it the same way.
  • Persistence Pays: All too often in Western culture, we take a “no” as really meaning “no”. To a Chinese negotiator, your “no” just means “no for now” and they will feel free to revisit it over and over again to see if you’ve changed your mind. Many western negotiators have commented on this by saying that Chinese negotiators appear to grind away until they end up getting most of what they want. Chinese negotiators have both consistency and persistence – be prepared!

Yes, a sales negotiator can successfully conduct business with Chinese negotiators. However, you need to be aware that they view the world differently than you do and YOU are the one that is going to have to adjust in order to have these negotiations turn out successfully.

Have you ever had an opportunity to negotiate a business deal with a Chinese negotiator? Did they keep coming back over and over again to issues that you thought were already closed? Were there any misunderstandings over vocabulary words? Did you end up building a quanxi relationship? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Chinese | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »