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.

All sales people are encouraged to learn everything of relevance about the deal while following their company sales process.  Key information about the deal includes the customer’s drivers, decision process, budget, time frames, and more.  To prepare for the negotiation, there is other information about the deal to uncover and validate in advance of the negotiation, in particular the impact of the customer’s preferred alternative (Consequences of No Agreement or CNA) and the trades that would make this a good deal for both sides. 

There's a notion that you never know what's going to happen in a negotiation.  In fact, by answering two questions before you get to the face-to-face part of negotiation, the less likely you will be surprised by anything that comes at you.  Listen to Brian Dietmeyer talk about these two questions in this short video.

Today. if a B2B company is to survive, much less flourish, it must be able to achieve sustainable organic growth. And there are many resources available to help such companies develop the two primary drivers they need to do so— providing differentiated customer value and being compensated in alignment with that value.

Negotiators, that is, expert negotiators in business and in all other walks of life do not begin to focus on a situation only after it begins to turn into a crisis. They prepare for the eventualities well in advance.  

Typically sales organizations approach training consultants to relieve a source of acute pain. Most often this pain is felt as commoditization attempts by professional buyers, price and margin pressure, irrational competitive behavior, and internal stakeholder dissatisfaction with sales.

Companies generally set themselves up for failure when they search for a stand-alone training class that focuses on solving acutely painful elements. Ultimately, they omit consideration of less obvious needs, ones that might be causing the pain.

Sometimes we have a very high interest in the outcome of a negotiation and our personal interests or the risk we are undertaking cloud our judgement, or at least do not allow us to see or weigh all the issues objectively. It is human nature to surround ourselves with like-minded people and those who agree with our strategies or pander to our ideas. This is a good idea if we want to boost our confidence or gather support for a specific initiative. However, in business negotiations, many times we are dealing with serious consequences, escalation or even litigation. What we need here is objectivity, reason, clarity of thought and solid good judgement.

Here's what your peers found worthwhile reading in April about B2B negotiation:

Have you every arrived for a negotiation meeting to discover that there are people whom you have never met from the client’s side ready to be involved in the negotiation?  Have you ever been given a specified time period (usually 1 hour) for the negotiation and find that almost all of the time is spent on the ‘wrong’ discussion?

There are numerous ways to solicit information about a business negotiation and the more obvious you are, the less likely it is that you'll get the information you're looking for. When you're validating your estimation of your customer's wish list, are you getting good answers to these three questions?