Do a search on negotiation training and you'll come up with over 2 million results! How do you know what to look for, and ultimately choose, for your organization? I'd like to bring some fresh thinking to the subject of selecting a business negotiation training firm.
How many times do you hear, "I can get the same thing cheaper..."? It's at the core of today's most pervasive problems in B2B sales:
- price pressure
- attempts at commoditization
- more professional buyer influence
How your sales people respond to that statement from a prospective customer will determine if they fail - or succeed. Just getting the sale is not a success if it's achieved at the cost of margin and brand equity.
Is your proposed negotiation training provider diagnosing the root causes of negotiation failures, or just looking at the symptoms?
The most common symptoms of a mal-functioning negotiation system are:
- declining margins
- unending deal cycles
- giving away aspects of your value proposition
- reacting to irrational completitive behavior in the same way
Has your prospective training solution provider defined the root causes of these symptoms?
How will their proposed negotiation interventions drive business results?
Instead of just another series of training events, consider providing your sales people with the knowledge to achieve proficiency with analytics that make a measureable and immediate impact on B2B negotiation.
Is you proposed negotiation training provider providing you with identifiable and measureable metrics? Or have they just aggregated success stories from sales people to create a qualitative "ROI?"
To have immediate business impact and achieve a measurable Return on Investment, a negotiation initiative must:
- tie directly to corporate strategy
- be sponsored by senior management
- have coaches who measure and are measured
Would you like to know more? Read the white paper, entitled "Changing the Conversation from the Price of Your Products to the Value of Your Solutions: diagnosing the root causes of negotiating problems."
