There's a notion that you never know what's going to happen in a negotiation.  In fact, by answering two questions before you get to the face-to-face part of negotiation, the less likely you will be surprised by anything that comes at you.  Listen to Brian Dietmeyer talk about these two questions in this short video.

Today. if a B2B company is to survive, much less flourish, it must be able to achieve sustainable organic growth. And there are many resources available to help such companies develop the two primary drivers they need to do so— providing differentiated customer value and being compensated in alignment with that value.

Typically sales organizations approach training consultants to relieve a source of acute pain. Most often this pain is felt as commoditization attempts by professional buyers, price and margin pressure, irrational competitive behavior, and internal stakeholder dissatisfaction with sales.

Companies generally set themselves up for failure when they search for a stand-alone training class that focuses on solving acutely painful elements. Ultimately, they omit consideration of less obvious needs, ones that might be causing the pain.

Once upon a time there was a negotiating marketplace where the sellers were comprised of huge multinational companies. These sellers were distributed throughout 25 industries. All the sellers had massive sales forces, many of which were the cream of the crop, from national and global account managers to the leadership. These salespeople and their leaders focused on the largest and most profitable customers for their companies. 

The connection between the sales function and corporate strategy is tenuous in many B2B companies. Even when given clear direction of their company's revenue, margin, and expense targets, Sales is mostly on their own to determine how they will go about achieving those targets while satisfying the needs of other cross-functional stakeholders in the organization. Departments whose objectives are impacted by Sales behavior implement siloed processes to protect their priorities, often frustrating the sales organization and doing nothing to enhance deal making or the customer experience.  And these gaps between sales and marketing, and other functional areas, too, are taken for granted in many industries.

If American corporations spend $7.2 billion* every year on sales processes, account management skills, negotiation, and opportunity management training, why aren't these training initiatives being interwoven into the "DNA" of the organization? Interestingly enough, three factors are cited most frequently in our research for failure to implement training initiatives:

Sometimes your company's approach to or attitude about business negotiation actually works against you at the negotiating table.

Despite the abundance of consulting, investments, training methodologies, and hype that focus on value - mining value, value statements, value selling, etc., - most of today's "tried and true" approaches fall short of helping B2B companies achieve a high level of competence at leveraging differentiated value for price premiums and risk reductions.  This is not surprising for two reasons:

Just how can companies develop and implement strategies that are responsive to today's business negotiation environment, where sellers are facing more complex negotiations, more professional buyers, more irrational competitive behavior, and more internal negotiation?  All of which are making negotiating even more difficult!

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