The marketplace is flooded with aggressive, professional buyers, competitors are behaving more irrationally and giving away value, and there are fewer opportunities to make deals. Plus, the deals that are made are longer term. In the face of this, sellers report reasonable sophistication on sales strategy and process as well as account-specific sales strategy and process. But they have virtually no negotiation strategy and process.
B2B Street Fighting Blog
Marie Dudek Brown
Recent Posts
3 rules to creating value in b2b negotiation
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Mon, Jul 16, 2012 @ 11:48 AM
Keep in mind three rules in regard to creating value in a business negotiation. The first concerns the meaning of value itself, which is expressed as Value = Benefit - Cost. We've all heard about sales processes that are supposed to add value but hardly ever succeed in creating real, measurable business value. A process does succeed when it enables you to add "hard" value (value you can measure) rather than "soft" value. If you can't put a potential trade through the equation above, you're not creating value.
Tags: business negotiations
business negotiation: your deals tell the market who you are
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Tue, Jul 10, 2012 @ 10:19 AM
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.
Tags: business negotiations
5 top posts on business negotiation you don't want to miss
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Mon, Jul 09, 2012 @ 10:09 AM
- Top 10 list for a strategic negotiation process
- Leveraging patterns in business negotiation
- Business negotiation technique: make more than one offer
- Negotiation skills training: dealing with professional buyers
- Negotiation training: important considerations for trading
Tags: negotiation tips
negotiation technique: your most effective negotiating tool
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Thu, Jul 05, 2012 @ 02:43 PM
This is a good time to talk about for whom professional buyers actually work. No doubt you have been taught to call on multiple buying influencers who play multiple roles in a customer organization. The people you are calling on are the purchasing agent's internal customers, the people who give them the criteria for evaluating one supplier over another.
On this American Independence Day, take a look at a video entitled, Negotiating Freedom. This film is about the negotiation process between brands, suppliers and unions in Indonesia.
negotiation skills training: creating value for both sides by trading
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Mon, Jul 02, 2012 @ 11:01 AM
Most buyers attempt to minimize the complexity of business negotiation by simply saying, "Well, the other side's price is lower." this is like trying to make a decision with the majority of the criteria missing. We all know that price is a function of many things: how much volume is being purchased, what products and services are included, who is assuming more risk and so on. So our job as professional negotiators is to get past a buyer's fixation on price and put all the moving parts on the table simultaneously, empowering both sides to make well-informed business decisions.
negotiation skills training: expect commoditization pressure
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Tue, Jun 26, 2012 @ 09:41 AM
Naturally, in any negotiation, it's in the buyer's best interest to at least attempt to commoditize everything you do by saying, "It's all the same, like T-bills or pork bellies...," just like the words "the same thing" in our dread sentence: "I can get the same thing cheaper from someone else." When the buyer does this, your product is only differentiated by price (hence the term price commoditization).
breakthrough selling and negotiating strategies
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Thu, Jun 21, 2012 @ 11:30 AM
The sales representative's role is changing yet again! It is the job of sales professionals to assist customers in understanding how they increase revenue, reduce expenses or improve processes by buying their products and services. How will sales consultants need to evolve? Brian J. Dietmeyer will be presenting on the subject of Breakthrough Selling and Negotiating Strategies at the upcoming TMI & TACK International Asia-Pacific Conference 2012 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on August 28, 2012.
In this session, Brian will review both strategic and tactical based changes salespeople must make to re-invent and re-establish themselves as consultants adding value to their clients.
negotiation skills training: dealing with professional buyers
Posted by Marie Dudek Brown on Wed, Jun 20, 2012 @ 02:37 PM
One of the major changes taking place in the business negotiation environment is the increasing number of professional buyers in the marketplace. This new type of buyer not only sees negotiation, like sales, as a process but, perhaps even more important for our purposes, is capable of performing in-depth analyses of your solution versus your competitor's to an extent that you probably haven't even begun to imagine. What this means is that many buyers are using what is effectvely a new purchasing model, on that enables them to quantify value to a much greater extent than the vast majority of salespeople.
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