business negotiation: your deals tell the market who you are

One impediment to negotiating success comes from a disconnect between account management and opportunity management processes.  When properly integrated, these processes ensure that selling fundamentals (e.g., identification of key buying influences, the role played by buyers and value solutions for the client's business problems) are more consistently executed.

One of the major benefits of your company incorporating a more prescribed approach to business negotiation into its selling framework is that it lets you strategically influence the marketplace.  The deals your company makes communicate to the marketplace who you are as a company, so taking greater control of the negotiating process helps to ensure that the market will see your company the way you want it to be seen.

In the Harvard Business Review (November, 2004) Danny Ertel wrote, "I have found that companies rarely think systematically about their negotiating activities as a whole.  Rather, they take a situational view, seeing each negotiation as a separate event, with its own goals, its own tactics, and its own measures of success."  Further, he added, "that approach can produce good results in particular instances but it can turn out to be counterproductive when viewed from a higher, more strategic plane." 

Companies appear to fall into two camps: either the negotiation constraints are so tight that the sales force is not empowered to make decisions, or the parameters are so broad that the market decisions they do make are inconsistent.  Aligning negotiation strategy and process allows for centralized planning (strategy) and decentralized execution (process), thereby enabling those closest to the customer to make faster and more effective negotiation decisions while ensuring that companies can present themselves as they want to be presented.