Q: Are you sick of hearing these 10 words from your customers?

“I can get the same thing cheaper from your competitor!”
Or, when the customer says,
"We want you to match the 10% discount offered by the competition.”  
As a sales executive, you know too well, when negotiating on price…

• Buyers treat your brand as a commodity
• Your sales reps run to their managers to get quick price discounting, thus…
• You have to ‘buy the business’ to make the sale
• And your sales cycle lingers on, taking too long

With potential buyers seeing you the same as everyone else. Because you sound like everyone else. They made it about price. And your reps are unable to change the conversation.
 

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There are many sales skills that have impact on the value of a strong sales team within an organization:

• Account Management
• Value Selling
• Questioning
• Presentation skills
• as well as a number of others.

However, one of the things we love most about our work in helping B2B sales organizations improve negotiation skills is the immediate, tangible, return on investment. Unlike many sales skills, negotiation is a hard skill: meaning not only is it highly measurable, but it also delivers business results fast! The other great news is that together, we, the Think! team with the client stakeholders, can identify this potential ROI before any investment is made to build the internal business case for a negotiation improvement initiative.

Here are results from five (5) Fortune 1000 clients in these industries: logistics, packaging, energy solutions and services, information services, and healthcare.

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Traditional negotiation training, as you no doubt already know, consists largely of memorizing long lists of tactics, countermeasures, and tips and tricks designed to prepare sales teams for every possible negotiation situation. This is based on the assumption that in a negotiation you never know what’s going to happen, and must, therefore, be prepared for anything. But what if I were to tell you that despite what you’ve always heard, 97% of what a seller is likely to hear coming out of a buyer’s mouth in a negotiation cannot only be anticipated, but also, if not nullified, at least greatly reduced in its power? (1)

It’s true. We can do it. 

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We’ve consulted on over 20,000 negotiations in over 45 countries for 16 years. The most common issue we see is: 

“Very seasoned negotiators having a price conversation absent of the value conversation.” 

What does this mean exactly? Imagine for a moment that you work at a high-end steak house and you encounter this scenario: 

1. You are seated a table and are ready to order. You order the Filet Oscar, the house specialty, which is listed at $42 on the menu.
2. You continue that you would like to pay $16 for it because that is what you paid last night for dinner (you fail to mention it was a plate of tacos at the restaurant down the street).
3. Your server goes to find the manager to ask for an adjustment to the bill to give you the discount.  

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Some of you know that I post quite a bit about working with procurement. There are a couple reasons. First, it’s mostly a painful and dreaded experience for those of us who sell. Second, because we’ve been consulting for over 20 years to both buying and selling teams, this practice has provided deep insight into the nature of that relationship.

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Sales reps need to evolve or they will go extinct; some already have. Don’t believe me? Let me tell you a story. It is a bit long, but I promise the payoff is there.

I am confident that most of you reading this have had the “opportunity” to buy a car from a traditional dealership? I needed a gently used 2017 truck. My favorite car to buy is usually less than one year old and has about 5,000 miles on it. Essentially, I am looking for a new car where someone else ate the depreciation.

When I started my search a couple weeks ago, I went to both the local Ford and Dodge dealerships to look at trucks. At both dealerships, I had nearly the exact same experience.

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A client asks us for a proposal. That’s a good thing, right? We do as they ask and provide a proposal. What’s next? We all know the first offer is likely not going to be the last. In fact, what many of us have done with that response is to give the client a price for products and services. The very natural inclination is for the customer to then begin the negotiations at this phase. We have DNA going back 1000 years saying that the buyer should never accept the first offer. We know what the conversation is going to be and where it’s headed, so how do we change that conversation and take control?

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After 22 years consulting on over 25,000 business negotiations in over 46 countries, we’ve heard a lot of negotiation tactics. All are attempts at commoditization and driving more concessions from the seller; some are more difficult than others.

A recent client was negotiating with their largest customer, a $60b Fortune 50 firm in the manufacturing business. Our client produces bleeding edge tools and software for manufacturing. In fact, they very often have tools that increase yield and reduce defects ahead of the market. This position gives them real power in negotiation. However, during the negotiation, their buyer, in a very angry and aggressive manner ended the negotiation proclaiming: 

“If you don't give us what we want, we will fund a start-up competitor to you!”

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In my last post, I reported my friend and colleague, Jim Dickie (https://www.salesmastery.com) recently surveyed sales leaders who stated their top barrier to achieving their 2018 revenue objectives was lack of coaching. That article focused on how to use virtual coach technology to address that issue. For this article, we will focus on the second issue for sales leaders:

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My friend and colleague, Jim Dickie (https://www.salesmastery.com) recently reported sales leaders stated their top barrier to achieving their 2018 revenue objectives is:

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