Ryder is a world leader in the supply chain and transportation management solutions industry. After the company completed a four-year restructuring program, and operating in a highly competitive market, Ryder determined the company's organization focus to be:

For many years, we have been asking our global clients for the most common and most difficult verbal negotiation tactics they face every day.  Their buyer's comments many sound different, but they all have one thing in common.  Whether buyers are asking for a price discount, an extended warranty or some other concession, the message is loud and clear:  they want something, they want it now and they want it for free... or less!  From our research and from what we have observed, they are very likely to get it!

Just as you would never dream of starting to build a house without a conventional blueprint, you can't build a deal that is worth negotiating without a plan to get where you are going.  The processes of data collection and analysis are key steps to what we at Think! call "blueprinting" a deal.  Blueprinting is a convenient way to view data-based preparation and analysis in its most basic and raw form; it essentially describes the steps needed to get your arms around all the moving parts in a complex B2B deal.

Trading helps you keep all the pieces of a deal in context, so you can keep the conversation away from price alone. Put simply, trading is the art of asking the buyer for something in return when he makes demands of you - whether for a lower price or other concessions. Trading is the heart and soul of negotiating. Done well, it combats pressure from the buyer to reduce the price of a deal or give away all manner of "stuff" for free, and sometimes less.

Price pressure is the second most common business negotiation problem we face today.  In fact, it is so pervasive that it has become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  The more you hear the word price from people who want you to focus on it (to the exclusion of just about everything else going on at the bargaining table), the more you consciously and unconsciously start to think about one and one thing only:  price.

"We're in a rush (a 30-day mentality) to get the business, so we tend to give in to customer demands versus negotiating a win/win situation.  Management is often too impatient to work through a negotiation process.  They take the deal and move on, regardless of the fact that we're impacting future business dealings with the customer by demonstrating that we'll quickly and easily relent to their demands when put under pressure, especially if there is a danger of not securing the business in our time frame (i.e., quarter-end or year-end)."*  Does this sound familiar?

In every successful negotiation we have ever been part of, we have found, and even more important, exploited a gap.  For example, a client that specialized in data management services found themselves in a situation in which one of their customers believed that building their own database would be better, faster and cheaper than buying what they said were the outrageously expensive services of our client.  When we helped them analyze this, we found huge gaps between what the customer needed and wanted and the customer's consequence of not reaching agreement - building it themselves.

• Do you know where the greatest opportunities for profitable growth are within your strategic customer segment?
• Are they new services, new solutions, business value model innovations?
• Is it the globalization of the SAM organization?
• Is it organizing by industry verticals?
• Is it managing the strategic customer's ecosystem differently from the past?

At Nalco Company, it was decided to choose a negotiation solution that would not only tackle the list of concerns they had, but turn a seemingly soft skill - as negotiation is so often tagged - into a hard skill, which is defined as a business process that is measurable and repeatable.  Nalco set out to build both Key Account Manager (KAM) and organizational competency that would heighten courage, reduce outcome variance and produce measureable impact one deal at a time. 

Negotiation is a very strategic issue.  At the highest level, the business deals that a salesperson completes during the year roll-up and actually become that brand. The way you negotiate your business deals around the world is either a deposit to or a withdrawal from your brand equity.