"There's an abundance of sales knowledge in the marketplace, yet organizations still don't understand how to make the most of it, " says Gerhard Gschwandtner, publisher of SellingPower magazine.   And just the other day, a blog post in Forbes entitled, "To Increase Revenue Stop Selling."  What's going on out there?!?!

Move beyond the usual listing of tactics surrounding business negotiation and listen to an alternative concept of negotiation as a predictable and repeatable process.  You'll hear about three specific counterpunches that any negotiator can employ to improve their success rate. Learn how to change any negotiation, including sales conversations, from one focused on price to one that considers the importance of value to the customer. 

Are you feeling the pain? Many of you told us you were in a recent survey conducted with the Strategic Account Management Association.  Ninety percent of you are facing more professional buyers who are more aggressive then ever, and you're saying there's more at stake, too:  deals are fewer, bigger, more complex and longer term.

Companies often come to Think! facing a major negotiation hurdle.  Oftentimes, the hurdle is based on perception:  they are intimidated by negotiation, they misdiagnose power or they freeze when they encounter a tactic for which they are unprepared.  The problem is that when we're unprepared, we're much more likely to give in to perception versus reality.  Let's look at some of the traps that are keeping us unprepared or ill-equipped to deal with our buyers' tactics.

When it comes to negotiation most companies forge ahead without agreement on where they want to go or how they'll get there.  Subsequently, they have little clue on where they will ultimately end up.  "We are not on the same page many times within the organization," admits a survey respondent. "We don't allow sales to have the parameters to negotiate.  We have to go to the next level to get approval."

We find that one of the core problems to clarifying value is either there is a lack of a common definition of what a value proposition is and / or you have a value "statement" that is too high level, too static and out of touch with street level deal making. 

When it comes right down to it, I don't want stories about how negotiation training improved my salesforce, or to know that lots of smiley faces are appearing on the post-workshop evaluations.  I want hard facts.  And here they are - all in one place.  Proven business results at five organizations:

Business negotiation has been made more complex than it needs to be, and that's far worse than confusing - it's disempowering. What keeps the deal afloat or makes it sink isn't pulling one perfect response out of a arsenal of a dozen, two dozen or 200 negotiation tactics. It has nothing to do with whether the person sitting on the other side of the table is the strong, silent type, a motor mouth, obsessive compulsive or ADHD.

The power of Multiple Equal Offers (MEOs) will astound you!  Consider the case of Tod Walton, Western Region Director of Business Development for Livingston International, Canada's top custom broker and trade-related services provider.  "Using MEOs enabled us to increase our close rates from 40% to well over 60%.  In fact, we recently closed a very large deal in our world.  They were a current client on one side of our business, but the business we closed was ten times that size, all because we used MEOs."

Selling value in an industry long steeped in precedents that focus on commoditization is tough enough. Getting credit for that value is even harder!  On Tuesday, May 8, 2012, Carrie Welles, Vice President, Global Customer Management at Think! Inc. will present a session at the 48th Annual Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) Conference in San Diego.  The session is entitled, "Best Practices in Preparing and Negotiating Solutions in a Commodity Market."