Do you think of business negotiation as an art or a science?  If you said art, you're part of the majority.  If you said science, you're part of the future.  Are you willing to consider the advantages to learning and using a process?  Among the most important of these advantages are that the process:

It's key to remember there are multiple people on your side of the deal and multiple influencers on the customer's side of the deal, all of whom have trading items of interest.  Rarely do they have all the trade data handy in one place.  By thinking through many of the deal items in advance, you can literally take proactive control of the business negotiation.  Even if you're only 50% to 60% accurate, you still will likely have more data than your customers or competitors.

A very common trap, one that surprisingly enough is even taught by some negotiating books, is that we make only one offer.  What does this accomplish?  Since deals always involve making multiple buying influencers happy, one offer most likely focuses on addressing the needs of only one buyer but not all of them.  It communicates that you have assessed their situation and are now in the best position to tell them what they need most.  And it immediately sets up a competitive atmostphere; if they disagree they have what they need to shop around, whether for a better price or more features for the same price.

Traditional classroom training is not the only way to learn.  Information Builders, a business intelligence and integration firm set out to install strategic negotiation competency into their firm to take pressure off margins and maintain customer relationships by negotiating based on business value.  They wanted to reduce the time for salespeople being out of pocket for traditional instructor-led training by 50% and, at the same time, actually improve the quality of the training solution.

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? We'd like to bring some fresh thinking to the subject of selecting a business negotiation training firm.

There is no easy solution to the complexities of a business-to-business deal. But in an economy that demands greater revenues year after year, there is tremendous room for growth for organizations willing to rethink and redefine how they approach negotiation. 

Many of the posts on the B2B Street Fighting blog are focused on the selling side of business negotiation.  And reading through them, supply side managers may get a false sense of security.  Just as your sales counterparts are improving their competency around negotiating, buyers can't sit back and be satisfied with relying on their past experiences.  Much has changed, and time is even more precious than ever.

Here are three items focusing on the buyer side of negotiation.

Today, I took a look at what you readers are finding interesting about business negotiation on our B2B Street Fighting blog.  I thought I'd share these posts with you.

Sales & Marketing Management magazine and their community for networking and peak performance, SMM Connect, announce a new webinar: Breakthrough Selling Strategies: Leveraging Patterns in Negotiation. This webinar will be held on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern. Mark your calendars now!

Data isn't very sexy or glamorous, but when it comes to business negotiation, it is the ultimate equalizer.  Having data makes Davids out of Goliaths, and ignoring data makes Goliaths out of Davids.  So here's some data on the trends we've found in a recent study on the current state of business negotiation at hundreds of prominent Fortune 500 companies.