Many of the posts on the B2B Street Fighting blog are focused on the selling side of business negotiation.  And reading through them, supply side managers may get a false sense of security.  Just as your sales counterparts are improving their competency around negotiating, buyers can't sit back and be satisfied with relying on their past experiences.  Much has changed, and time is even more precious than ever.

Here are three items focusing on the buyer side of negotiation.

Today, I took a look at what you readers are finding interesting about business negotiation on our B2B Street Fighting blog.  I thought I'd share these posts with you.

Sales & Marketing Management magazine and their community for networking and peak performance, SMM Connect, announce a new webinar: Breakthrough Selling Strategies: Leveraging Patterns in Negotiation. This webinar will be held on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 10am Pacific / 1pm Eastern. Mark your calendars now!

Data isn't very sexy or glamorous, but when it comes to business negotiation, it is the ultimate equalizer.  Having data makes Davids out of Goliaths, and ignoring data makes Goliaths out of Davids.  So here's some data on the trends we've found in a recent study on the current state of business negotiation at hundreds of prominent Fortune 500 companies.

"There's an abundance of sales knowledge in the marketplace, yet organizations still don't understand how to make the most of it, " says Gerhard Gschwandtner, publisher of SellingPower magazine.   And just the other day, a blog post in Forbes entitled, "To Increase Revenue Stop Selling."  What's going on out there?!?!

Move beyond the usual listing of tactics surrounding business negotiation and listen to an alternative concept of negotiation as a predictable and repeatable process.  You'll hear about three specific counterpunches that any negotiator can employ to improve their success rate. Learn how to change any negotiation, including sales conversations, from one focused on price to one that considers the importance of value to the customer. 

Are you feeling the pain? Many of you told us you were in a recent survey conducted with the Strategic Account Management Association.  Ninety percent of you are facing more professional buyers who are more aggressive then ever, and you're saying there's more at stake, too:  deals are fewer, bigger, more complex and longer term.

Companies often come to Think! facing a major negotiation hurdle.  Oftentimes, the hurdle is based on perception:  they are intimidated by negotiation, they misdiagnose power or they freeze when they encounter a tactic for which they are unprepared.  The problem is that when we're unprepared, we're much more likely to give in to perception versus reality.  Let's look at some of the traps that are keeping us unprepared or ill-equipped to deal with our buyers' tactics.

When it comes to negotiation most companies forge ahead without agreement on where they want to go or how they'll get there.  Subsequently, they have little clue on where they will ultimately end up.  "We are not on the same page many times within the organization," admits a survey respondent. "We don't allow sales to have the parameters to negotiate.  We have to go to the next level to get approval."

We find that one of the core problems to clarifying value is either there is a lack of a common definition of what a value proposition is and / or you have a value "statement" that is too high level, too static and out of touch with street level deal making.