Counterparts in negotiations always face more than one possible outcome. Many times, the possibilities or options, are many. However, when it comes to choosing between attractive courses of action, most people would rather have a bird in the hand, so to speak. This is a basic tenet of human behavior, most commonly referred to as risk aversion. Being conservative, playing it safe, or watching your back is quite a trait carried by most logical thinkers. More than  85% of students from past MBA and Executive negotiations courses would rather have $10,000 than a 50/50 chance at having $20,000.

What we’re hearing today from procurement professionals is a desire to “increase internal share of spend and reduce rogue buys.”  As a salesperson if you’re not sure what this means, you need to know.

No doubt you have been taught to call on multiple buying influencers who play multiple roles in a customer organization.  The people you are calling on are the purchasing agent's internal customers, the people who give them the criteria for evaluating one supplier over another.

All sales people are encouraged to learn everything of relevance about the deal while following their company sales process.  Key information about the deal includes the customer’s drivers, decision process, budget, time frames, and more.  To prepare for the negotiation, there is other information about the deal to uncover and validate in advance of the negotiation, in particular the impact of the customer’s preferred alternative (Consequences of No Agreement or CNA) and the trades that would make this a good deal for both sides. 

Negotiators, that is, expert negotiators in business and in all other walks of life do not begin to focus on a situation only after it begins to turn into a crisis. They prepare for the eventualities well in advance.  

Sometimes we have a very high interest in the outcome of a negotiation and our personal interests or the risk we are undertaking cloud our judgement, or at least do not allow us to see or weigh all the issues objectively. It is human nature to surround ourselves with like-minded people and those who agree with our strategies or pander to our ideas. This is a good idea if we want to boost our confidence or gather support for a specific initiative. However, in business negotiations, many times we are dealing with serious consequences, escalation or even litigation. What we need here is objectivity, reason, clarity of thought and solid good judgement.

Have you every arrived for a negotiation meeting to discover that there are people whom you have never met from the client’s side ready to be involved in the negotiation?  Have you ever been given a specified time period (usually 1 hour) for the negotiation and find that almost all of the time is spent on the ‘wrong’ discussion?

In our rush to wrap up a negotiation and show good faith, many times we make concessions that are either too quick or too costly, or both. This is why, as a negotiator, you need to plan what the likely "asks" might be from your counterpart, and have some trades or concessions to offer up as alternatives. 

You may never have used the expression Consequences of No Agreement, but chances are that you've thought about them.  After all, you know that something is going to happen if you don't make a deal.  As the seller, your Consequences of No Agreement - your alternative to making a deal - is most likely going to be losing the sale.  Your customer generally has three possible alternatives to reaching agreement with you.  He or she can:

So often Sales Professionals say their goal in any deal is to get the ‘win-win.’ But, when asked, the same salespeople struggle to explain what a ‘win-win’ truly means. Do you achieve a 'win-win' when both sides simply agree to a deal? If this is the case, what if the client is not particularly happy with the deal agreed?