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There are numerous ways to solicit information about a business negotiation and the more obvious you are, the less likely it is that you'll get the information you're looking for.  When you're validating your estimation of your customer's wish list, are you getting good answers to these three questions?

As a B2B street fighter, it's your job to get the negotiation process on track by getting more facts on the table and literally steering the fight where you want it to go.  In other words, you want to start proactively managing the deal versus thinking about negotiation as a tactical response to a professional buyer.  It's all about acting first, not reacting later.  With the three steps below, you will no longer be thinking, "S-O-S! S-O-S! I've got to get my ship out of these stormy waters and live to fight another day!"  Instead, you start thinking, "I'm going to be steering the ship into calmer seas, where I can get a better perspective, make a better deal for me and provide a better solution for my customer." 

Business negotiation should never be approached as a fire sale, where, for example, there's always a deadline looming or some stubborn price point the customer must have:  "I want to close next week," "I want to close at this price point," or "I need this percentage."  These are not goals, but merely tactics.  In fact, closing by a certain date is a trade and perhaps an important one, and shouldn't be an overall end goal for the dealmaker.  Similarly, obtaining a certain price point is also a trade. 

This is a good time to talk about for whom professional buyers actually work.  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.

Most buyers attempt to minimize the complexity of business negotiation by simply saying, "Well, the other side's price is lower."  this is like trying to make a decision with the majority of the criteria missing.  We all know that price is a function of many things:  how much volume is being purchased, what products and services are included, who is assuming more risk and so on.  So our job as professional negotiators is to get past a buyer's fixation on price and put all the moving parts on the table simultaneously, empowering both sides to make well-informed business decisions.

Naturally, in any negotiation, it's in the buyer's best interest to at least attempt to commoditize everything you do by saying, "It's all the same, like T-bills or pork bellies...," just like the words "the same thing" in our dread sentence: "I can get the same thing cheaper from someone else."  When the buyer does this, your product is only differentiated by price (hence the term price commoditization).

One of the major changes taking place in the business negotiation environment is the increasing number of professional buyers in the marketplace. This new type of buyer not only sees negotiation, like sales, as a process but, perhaps even more important for our purposes, is capable of performing in-depth analyses of your solution versus your competitor's to an extent that you probably haven't even begun to imagine.  What this means is that many buyers are using what is effectvely a new purchasing model, on that enables them to quantify value to a much greater extent than the vast majority of salespeople. 

A very common trap, one that surprisingly enough is even taught by some negotiating books, is that we make only one offer.  What does this accomplish?  Since deals always involve making multiple buying influencers happy, one offer most likely focuses on addressing the needs of only one buyer but not all of them.  It communicates that you have assessed their situation and are now in the best position to tell them what they need most.  And it immediately sets up a competitive atmostphere; if they disagree they have what they need to shop around, whether for a better price or more features for the same price.

Do a search on negotiation training and you'll come up with over 2 million results! How do you know what to look for, and ultimately choose, for your organization? We'd like to bring some fresh thinking to the subject of selecting a business negotiation training firm.