Negotiators, that is, expert negotiators in business and in all other walks of life do not begin to focus on a situation only after it begins to turn into a crisis. They prepare for the eventualities well in advance.  

Typically sales organizations approach training consultants to relieve a source of acute pain. Most often this pain is felt as commoditization attempts by professional buyers, price and margin pressure, irrational competitive behavior, and internal stakeholder dissatisfaction with sales.

Sometimes we have a very high interest in the outcome of a negotiation and our personal interests or the risk we are undertaking cloud our judgement, or at least do not allow us to see or weigh all the issues objectively. It is human nature to surround ourselves with like-minded people and those who agree with our strategies or pander to our ideas. This is a good idea if we want to boost our confidence or gather support for a specific initiative. However, in business negotiations, many times we are dealing with serious consequences, escalation or even litigation. What we need here is objectivity, reason, clarity of thought and solid good judgement.

Here's what your peers found worthwhile reading in April about B2B negotiation:

Have you every arrived for a negotiation meeting to discover that there are people whom you have never met from the client’s side ready to be involved in the negotiation?  Have you ever been given a specified time period (usually 1 hour) for the negotiation and find that almost all of the time is spent on the ‘wrong’ discussion?

There are numerous ways to solicit information about a business negotiation and the more obvious you are, the less likely it is that you'll get the information you're looking for. When you're validating your estimation of your customer's wish list, are you getting good answers to these three questions?

Once upon a time there was a negotiating marketplace where the sellers were comprised of huge multinational companies. These sellers were distributed throughout 25 industries. All the sellers had massive sales forces, many of which were the cream of the crop, from national and global account managers to the leadership. These salespeople and their leaders focused on the largest and most profitable customers for their companies. 

Take five minutes to look at what your peers are finding worthwhile reading about B2B negotiation from the B2B Street Fighting blog:

In our rush to wrap up a negotiation and show good faith, many times we make concessions that are either too quick or too costly, or both. This is why, as a negotiator, you need to plan what the likely "asks" might be from your counterpart, and have some trades or concessions to offer up as alternatives. 

Chances are your buyer cannot get the "same thing" cheaper. In virtually every business negotiation where there are professional buyers on one side of the deal and professional sellers on the other, the business solution being negotiated has virtually no chance of being "the same" as what your competitor is offering.