While having general agreement on a particular way to negotiate deals is beneficial to the entire organization, what is more beneficial is providing individual negotiators with ample flexibility to address their own situations within those guidelines. 

Has this ever happened to you?  Those 138 tips and tactics you memorized at the negotiation seminar... you can't remember one.  Your mind races to determine which negotiation personality type you could categorize this hard-bargainer under and all you can come up with is 'jerk.'  (Unfortunately, this fifth personality type wasn't discussed!)

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

In our work with major buying organizations we find that very few purchasing decisions are made based on price alone.  Virtually every purchasing organization we have experience with evaluates suppliers with a matrix and price is simply one of the many criteria.  In most instances, the lowest priced supplier does not get the business.  Buyers are charged with supplying their organizations with the lowest total cost of ownership solution.

Do a search on negotiation training and you'll come up with over 2 million results!  How do you know what to look for, and ultimately choose, for your organization?  I'd like to bring some fresh thinking to the subject of selecting a business negotiation training firm.

What salespeople really need is not more processes but more data, that is, more information concerning their customers’ needs and how they can meet those needs better than the customers’ alternatives. When salespeople have this additional data, they will be able to recognize that deals are not that different from each other. While it is true that customers all have different needs, and that both the solutions a supplier provides and its alternatives have wide ranges, when needs, solutions, and alternatives are viewed from a high enough level, it becomes obvious that the issues that must be dealt with fall into very specific areas, or follow patterns.  And while these areas may change with different customer verticals or solution types, they continue to be similar. These areas include:  

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. 

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

Begin with a goal to "create joint value and divide it given concerns for fairness in the ongoing relationship."  There are numerous small steps involved in attaining this goal, including estimations of the consequences to both sides of not reaching agreement (CNA) and estimations of items each side is interested in including in the deal.  All of this work done so far has been engineered to bring you to this point -- the point at which you can actually begin to create value.  You create value in two ways.

No doubt you have been taught to call on multiple buying influencers who play multiple roles in a customer organization.  The people you are calling on are the purchasing agent's internal customers, the people who give them the criteria for evaluating one supplier over another.