Some of our recent research shows some interesting and significantly differing responses from C-suite executives and street-level sales professionals.

The key to establishing a successful business strategy is stakeholder involvement.  That's certainly true of all members of the company's internal negotiation system.  This means not only the field salesforce but all those in the legal department as well as in sales, product, and senior management who are involved in negotiations.  It's essential to include these groups for several reasons.  Perhaps the most important of which is they all have their own particular roles in the process, their own methods and their own interests in the outcome.

Our deal is going through; so now we’re ready to talk “terms.” Trading gives us a powerful way to determine what both buyer and seller really want so we can use trade data to make each deal more productive and profitable.

We would like to capture your voice in new benchmarking research.  In exchange for your time, we will offer a free copy of the results as well as benchmark your company against  those results.  In addition, your name will be entered in a drawing for a Kindle reader (should you desire).

Begin with a goal to "create joint value and divide it given concerns for fairness in the ongoing relationship."  There are numerous small steps involved in attaining this goal, including estimations of the consequences to both sides of not reaching agreement (CNA) and estimations of items each side is interested in including in the deal.  All of this work done so far has been engineered to bring you to this point -- the point at which you can actually begin to create value.  You create value in two ways.

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The marketplace is flooded with aggressive, professional buyers, competitors are behaving more irrationally and giving away value, and there are fewer opportunities to make deals.  Plus, the deals that are made are longer term.  In the face of this, sellers report reasonable sophistication on sales strategy and process as well as account-specific sales strategy and process.  But they have virtually no negotiation strategy and process. 

Keep in mind three rules in regard to creating value in a business negotiation.  The first concerns the meaning of value itself, which is expressed as Value = Benefit - Cost.  We've all heard about sales processes that are supposed to add value but hardly ever succeed in creating real, measurable business value.  A process does succeed when it enables you to add "hard" value (value you can measure) rather than "soft" value.  If you can't put a potential trade through the equation above, you're not creating value.

One impediment to negotiating success comes from a disconnect between account management and opportunity management processes.  When properly integrated, these processes ensure that selling fundamentals (e.g., identification of key buying influences, the role played by buyers and value solutions for the client's business problems) are more consistently executed.

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.