"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. 

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."

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."

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:

We're coming up to the end of the first quarter of the year.  Salespeople are looking at their numbers and thinking about what they need to do to meet their goals.  Is this you?  Are you willing to do anything to complete this business negotiation and close the deal with your customer?  

Great news to share with you!  getAbstract now has its recommendation of B2B Street Fighting available in Chinese.

Selling is a process through which the seller identifies how the solutions he offers resolve a buyer’s needs at a given point in time. Whereas negotiation is the process through which both parties agree to the terms of a deal, which is better for both than any other alternative deal. Some people have stated there should only be a negotiation when there is a genuine commitment from both the buyer and seller towards a conditional sale. However, I think this approach is somewhat short-sighted.