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.

And most salespeople never think about!  It is not human. It is not department or LOB-specific.   But it is there every day.  And very often this competitor quietly causes your deal to ‘go away.'

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:  

Counterparts in negotiations always face more than one possible outcome. Many times, the possibilities or options, are many. However, when it comes to choosing between attractive courses of action, most people would rather have a bird in the hand, so to speak. This is a basic tenet of human behavior, most commonly referred to as risk aversion. Being conservative, playing it safe, or watching your back is quite a trait carried by most logical thinkers. More than  85% of students from past MBA and Executive negotiations courses would rather have $10,000 than a 50/50 chance at having $20,000.

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. 

What we’re hearing today from procurement professionals is a desire to “increase internal share of spend and reduce rogue buys.”  As a salesperson if you’re not sure what this means, you need to know.

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.