You've all heard this before: "If the opportunity is large enough, then we are more likely to reduce margins without receiving anything in return."  Perhaps that's what happened on the last deal you negotiated!   Only one in five best-in-class sales leaders and professionals will never buckle when a customer demands something for nothing.  Four in five will concede.  In doing so, they trigger irrational competitive behavior and destroy brand equity by revealing to their customers that everything they say about their value is a lie.  After all, you can't claim you're the value leader when everyone knows that in the final hour your prices will sink faster than the Titanic.

You're not alone! Many people tell us they are fearful of negotiating.  Most are afraid they don't know what data is needed.  Or they have attended a negotiation workshop that provided them with hundreds of tactics, but are afraid they won't recall what they are. 

At it's most basic level, the Strategic Negotiation Process is a step-by-step system that enables you to blueprint a negotiation, making it possible for you to see and understand a negotiation from your own perspective as well as that of your customer. 

Have you been to a fast-food drive-through lately?  If you have, you probably noticed more choices than were there a year or two ago.  Now, instead of just being able to get fries and a soda with your burger, you have a wide variety of menu items to choose from.  You could, theoretically, drive away with the traditional burger, fries and a soda, or you could enjoy a broiled chicken sandwich, side salad and unsweetened tea.  You might even drive off with a soy burger, unsalted pretzels and apple juice.

"without realizing it, many companies have systematically taught their customers the art of blackmail."* When we approach business negotiations by tactically reacting to customers' requests, by merely giving in because they ask us to do so, seemingly disparate transactions have the effect of "rolling upward" and defining our negotiation strategy.  We teach the maketplace, our customers and our competitors, who we are based on the deals we do.  By rolling over in negotiations, we run into several problems:

It's not unusual to see situations in which neither side has a clear idea of what they really want out of a business negotiation beyond one or two simple items. When people are asked about their negotiation goals, a great many state they have no goals at all.  This is, at least in part, because they approach negotiation with a tactical rather than a strategic mind-set and, as a result, are much more concerned with figuring out how to get there than with where they want to go.  This is a problem because, among other things, not knowing where you want to go can make it very difficult - if not impossible - to get there!

An anchor is a starting point for one aspect of a negotiation or, in some instances, an entire negotiation.  An anchor can be true or false, appropriate or inappropriate, in any given negotiation.* Nevertheless, only anchors that are both true and appropriate can be beneficial to both you and your customer, as only such anchors will enable you to create value.

In the vast majority of organizations, every negotiation is seen as zero-based and different from every other negotiation.  But, on a basic level, all business negotiations ultimately follow the same blueprint:

There's an element of creativity involved when you broaden the business deal and clarify the "it" you are negotiating.  A world-class salesperson looks for avenues to add value to the deal being negotiated.