When it comes right down to it, I don't want stories about how negotiation training improved my salesforce, or to know that lots of smiley faces are appearing on the post-workshop evaluations.  I want hard facts.  And here they are - all in one place.  Proven business results at five organizations:

Business negotiation has been made more complex than it needs to be, and that's far worse than confusing - it's disempowering. What keeps the deal afloat or makes it sink isn't pulling one perfect response out of a arsenal of a dozen, two dozen or 200 negotiation tactics. It has nothing to do with whether the person sitting on the other side of the table is the strong, silent type, a motor mouth, obsessive compulsive or ADHD.

The power of Multiple Equal Offers (MEOs) will astound you!  Consider the case of Tod Walton, Western Region Director of Business Development for Livingston International, Canada's top custom broker and trade-related services provider.  "Using MEOs enabled us to increase our close rates from 40% to well over 60%.  In fact, we recently closed a very large deal in our world.  They were a current client on one side of our business, but the business we closed was ten times that size, all because we used MEOs."

Selling value in an industry long steeped in precedents that focus on commoditization is tough enough. Getting credit for that value is even harder!  On Tuesday, May 8, 2012, Carrie Welles, Vice President, Global Customer Management at Think! Inc. will present a session at the 48th Annual Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) Conference in San Diego.  The session is entitled, "Best Practices in Preparing and Negotiating Solutions in a Commodity Market."

Great news to share with you! getAbstract now has its recommendation of B2B Street Fighting available in Russian, French and Portuguese, in addition to Chinese.

Suppose your company could make the exact product or service each one of your customers needed and suppose you could price it and sell it so it maximized your returns. That does sound like a bit of a stretch, but if we think about it, in many instances we can come pretty close to this scenario by doing three things.  We need to:

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!

Most buyers attempt to minimize the complexity of business negotiation by simply saying, "Well, your competitor's price is lower."  Chances are your buyer cannot get the "same thing" cheaper.  In virtually every business negotiation where there are professional buyers on one side of the deal and professional sellers on the other, the business solution being negotiated has virtually no chance of being "the same" as what your competitor is offering.

It's not only ineffective or nonexistent sales processes that cause negotiation problems. Other aspects of a deal, although not directly connected to negotiations, can have an impact on them.  For example, we've worked with many clients over the years who have products that are priced too high, quality that's too low, or technology that's out-of-date relative to their competitors.  Not surprisingly, these firms experience many sales and, subsequently, negotiation problems, which is why they turn to consultants for solutions.  But these aren't the kinds of problems that can be fixed with a training class on a negotiation process. These are value-proposition problems, and they can't be negotiated away.  Having to compete against a firm that has a better, faster, cheaper alternative to your product or service can only be rectified in the long term by correcting your own company's value proposition.

There are very few - if any - complete solutions to any problem.  Despite the many benefits of a strategic negotiation process, there are some problems that even it can't solve.  Many negotiation problems, in fact, stem from a poorly executed or nonexistent sales process.  Poor account selection is one example.  If you sell for a firm that prides itself on providing value and solutions versus the lowest cost, and you call on customers who don't share those values, you are creating problems that, though unrelated to negotiations, will nevertheless have an impact on those negotiations.