Here's what your peers are reading about B2B negotiation:

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.

Thought I'd share with you this information about an upcoming, complimentary webinar from IACCM about something near and dear to our hearts, the business value conversation.  Take a look below at the webinar description from the IACCM website:

Think! Inc. provides research-based negotiation training for buyers. We help Procurement professionals become more successful negotiators. All the countermeasures, tactics, behaviors, tips, tricks and gimmicks typically taught by negotiation "training" or other "experts" may be helpful hints, but they are not a blueprint for successful negotiating. In fact, they have few, if any, long-term, positive effects on the negotiating skills of an individual or the negotiating competency of an organization. A company training its Procurement professionals in such a traditional soft skills approach to negotiation cannot expect much improvement in negotiation effectiveness.

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.

A very common trap, one that surprisingly enough is even taught by some business 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 atmosphere:  if they disagree, they have what they need to shop around, whether for a better price or more features for the same price.

American corporations spend $7.2 billion* every year on sales processes, account management sills, negotiation and opportunity management training.  That's an average of $347,000 per company, according to SellingPower.  But there is little information available on whether or not those investing the money are achieving a return on their investment that's at least equal to -- if not better than -- their cost of capital.

Supply Managers agree the single source negotiation often results in the Supply Manager feeling less than powerful, and/or an opportunity focused Supplier makes them feel like they have been taken advantage of.  One-sided negotiations seemingly expedite even the best Supply Managers to thinking they are in a very difficult to win situation.  Indeed this very line of thought creates a very powerful fear, and one of the most persistent myths in negotiations, the assumption of a fixed pie negotiation.

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!  Negotiation is no longer about pulling the perfect response out of an arsenal of a dozen, two dozen or 200 negotiation tactics to make a procurement officer magically buckle.  Negotiation is not a soft skill that's strictly the domain of sales professionals.  It's not a necessary evil that concludes the sales cycle.