Great news to share with you! getAbstract now has its recommendation of B2B Street Fighting available in Russian, French and Portuguese, in addition to Chinese.

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!

Most buyers attempt to minimize the complexity of business negotiation by simply saying, "Well, your competitor's price is lower."  Chances are your buyer cannot get the "same thing" cheaper.  In virtually every business negotiation where there are professional buyers on one side of the deal and professional sellers on the other, the business solution being negotiated has virtually no chance of being "the same" as what your competitor is offering.

It's not only ineffective or nonexistent sales processes that cause negotiation problems. Other aspects of a deal, although not directly connected to negotiations, can have an impact on them.  For example, we've worked with many clients over the years who have products that are priced too high, quality that's too low, or technology that's out-of-date relative to their competitors.  Not surprisingly, these firms experience many sales and, subsequently, negotiation problems, which is why they turn to consultants for solutions.  But these aren't the kinds of problems that can be fixed with a training class on a negotiation process. These are value-proposition problems, and they can't be negotiated away.  Having to compete against a firm that has a better, faster, cheaper alternative to your product or service can only be rectified in the long term by correcting your own company's value proposition.

There are very few - if any - complete solutions to any problem.  Despite the many benefits of a strategic negotiation process, there are some problems that even it can't solve.  Many negotiation problems, in fact, stem from a poorly executed or nonexistent sales process.  Poor account selection is one example.  If you sell for a firm that prides itself on providing value and solutions versus the lowest cost, and you call on customers who don't share those values, you are creating problems that, though unrelated to negotiations, will nevertheless have an impact on those negotiations.

We're coming up to the end of the first quarter of the year.  Salespeople are looking at their numbers and thinking about what they need to do to meet their goals.  Is this you?  Are you willing to do anything to complete this business negotiation and close the deal with your customer?  

Our research and global fieldwork have shown that virtually every negotiation, regardless of who's conducting it or where it takes place, can be blueprinted in exactly the same way.  This is extremely important, because we also found that everything that takes place in the course of a negotiation - the planning and the research as well as all the tactics used in the final face-to-face meeting - is ultimately driven by that blueprint.  But what is it?  It's essentially a picture of the entire negotiation, a picture that can be determined by anwering two questions for those on both sides of any deal:

Despite the creation and implementation of sales processes, there is still one area of sales that was considered, and is still considered, a tactical, reactive, and behavioral art:  the art of negotiating.  Because of the way business was conducted in the past, the fact that no established processes for sales negotiating existed didn't present any particular problems.  However, the same market forces that 20 years ago drove sales to shift from a personal relationship model to a more process-oriented and analytical one are now driving the need for a new approach to negotiating. 

Each day we are feeling the pressures of the increasing numbers of professional buyers attempting to commoditize our products and services, and putting pressure on top and bottom line.  The need to invest in core competencies, like negotiation, has not been stronger in the last 50 years!  At the same time, having salespeople out of pocket for multiple days of generic "training" is also a challenge.  This is exactly what faced Information Builders, a business intelligence and integration firm.

Great news to share with you!  getAbstract now has its recommendation of B2B Street Fighting available in Chinese.