Naturally, in any negotiation, it's in the buyer's best interest to at least attempt to commoditize everything you do by saying, "It's all the same, like T-bills or pork bellies...," just like the words "the same thing" in our dread sentence: "I can get the same thing cheaper from someone else."  When the buyer does this, your product is only differentiated by price (hence the term price commoditization).

The sales representative's role is changing yet again!  It is the job of sales professionals to assist customers in understanding how they increase revenue, reduce expenses or improve processes by buying their products and services.  How will sales consultants need to evolve?  Brian J. Dietmeyer will be presenting on the subject of Breakthrough Selling and Negotiating Strategies at the upcoming TMI & TACK International Asia-Pacific Conference 2012 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on August 28, 2012. 

In this session, Brian will review both strategic and tactical based changes salespeople must make to re-invent and re-establish themselves as consultants adding value to their clients.

One of the major changes taking place in the business negotiation environment is the increasing number of professional buyers in the marketplace. This new type of buyer not only sees negotiation, like sales, as a process but, perhaps even more important for our purposes, is capable of performing in-depth analyses of your solution versus your competitor's to an extent that you probably haven't even begun to imagine.  What this means is that many buyers are using what is effectvely a new purchasing model, on that enables them to quantify value to a much greater extent than the vast majority of salespeople. 

Have you ever recognized any patterns when you are negotiating business deals?  Negotiation has long been thought of as a soft skill or a set of counter tactics in response to a random tactic from the other side. Over the last 15 years this myth has been disproved.

Do you think of business negotiation as an art or a science?  If you said art, you're part of the majority.  If you said science, you're part of the future.  Are you willing to consider the advantages to learning and using a process?  Among the most important of these advantages are that the process:

It's key to remember there are multiple people on your side of the deal and multiple influencers on the customer's side of the deal, all of whom have trading items of interest.  Rarely do they have all the trade data handy in one place.  By thinking through many of the deal items in advance, you can literally take proactive control of the business negotiation.  Even if you're only 50% to 60% accurate, you still will likely have more data than your customers or competitors.

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

Traditional classroom training is not the only way to learn.  Information Builders, a business intelligence and integration firm set out to install strategic negotiation competency into their firm to take pressure off margins and maintain customer relationships by negotiating based on business value.  They wanted to reduce the time for salespeople being out of pocket for traditional instructor-led training by 50% and, at the same time, actually improve the quality of the training 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? We'd like to bring some fresh thinking to the subject of selecting a business negotiation training firm.

There is no easy solution to the complexities of a business-to-business deal. But in an economy that demands greater revenues year after year, there is tremendous room for growth for organizations willing to rethink and redefine how they approach negotiation.