HOW WINNERS SELL

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November 2004

How Winners Negotiate^TM

By Dave Stein, Author of How Winners Sell

Just as in other aspects of selling, there are no perfect answers when it comes to negotiating with a customer.

I did a quick search on Amazon and it returned 76,400 books about negotiating--that's a lot of books, but again, there aren't any perfect answers.    If I have a product that my customer needs and only I am in the position to provide it, you might say, doesn't that leave me in a very strong negotiating position? Sure it does. But if you don't negotiate that deal effectively, even with you having the upper hand at that moment, you could very well wind up with a resentful customer, leaving you with a short term win but a long term problem.

It's not my intention in this article to provide a primer on negotiating.  Rather, I share with you some insights, strategies, and proven tactics from my network of experts*--sales winners who have made and will continue to make lots of money winning clean deals based upon delivering real business value to their customers and clients. These are strategies and tactics you can put to use now.

A few years ago I watched the CEO of a client's company practically squeeze the life out of a sales manager who worked for a very large technology provider on the last day of that vendor's fiscal year.  That manager was up against the wall and everyone knew it.  (The rep had long since been replaced by his manager in that deal.)  I was certain the manager had forecasted the deal and had to bring it in.  The CEO crushed him.  A contract was signed, faxed to the vendor's corporate headquarters, where it was approved and the CEO gloated.  Six months later, the CEO received notice that unless the contract terms were renegotiated, the vendor would exercise an option in the agreement to unilaterally terminate it.  By then the CEO was trapped in the pricing model he himself had negotiated, and had commitments to customers to deliver product based upon that model.  Suing would have meant a $300k / 3 year quest.  The contract was renegotiated to where it should have been in the first place--to what would have been a win for both parties.

In this article, I show you how to start negotiating from day one, do proper research and preparation for your negotiation, what do with “Sacred Cows”,  when to use walking away,  and how to leverage influence in the negotiation.

©2004 -- The Stein Advantage, Inc.  All Rights Reserved

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