4 Quick Tips for Better Sales Negotiation Outcomes

By: Heather Meeker Green

If you are in sales, you know that the beginning of the year is crucial for setting up good habits and creating short term wins. Important actions include filling your pipeline, not losing sight of your current customers while you qualify new ones and getting organized.

Setting up for effective sales negotiations is no different. We believe that the negotiation process runs on a parallel track with your sales process.  To kickstart your year for good negotiation outcomes, we suggest strong preparation in 4 key areas representing the Why, Who, How, and What for your negotiations. Set aside 10-15 minutes and work on maximizing the possibility of a good outcome in these arenas. Winging it is risky even on cold or lukewarm calls.

1)    WHY? INTERESTS

Know your own interests well. That means understanding your company’s needs, motivations, concerns as well as your personal interests. Yes, you want to make a sale at every opportunity and you also want it to be a good sale, one that is strong for the long-term, easy to implement, and enhances your working relationships internally and externally. Given this, you want a negotiation outcome that is based on meeting your priority interests at the very least and preferably as many of your interests as possible. As you prepare your list of what is important to your organization and to you, dig deeply underneath each response for the real why. You may find many key interests below the surface ones. And consider what is important to your counterpart as best you can because they won’t agree unless it satisfies their core needs.

2)    WHO? RELATIONSHIPS

In order to set the sales negotiation up for success, think about all of the parties who are involved from both organizations along with any third parties who could be impacted. Consider any parties who are not currently involved who could be helpful on your own side as well as with your counterpart. Figure out which relationships are non-existent and need fostering, which currently exist and are good and could be leveraged, and which exist and could benefit from enhancement to strengthen them. While we often focus directly on the substance of a negotiation, relationships are equally important and play a critical role in good negotiations. You may also want to assess and add skills to your EQ abilities for social awareness and relationship management to support your pursuit of beneficial working relationships.

3)    HOW? PROCESS

It is helpful to understand what your counterpart’s decision-making authority and process is. What is the timeline and who is involved in making the final determination? For example, if your negotiation meetings include the final decision maker every time, you can prepare with a certain focus or perspective aimed at addressing their specific interests in the solution and the partnership with you.  If you are working directly with an end user who is not the final agreement maker and know that procurement will be a separate conversation, you may want to tailor your early conversations to the end user to create an internal champion, and then consider a focus on the later conversation with procurement to align with their different interests.  

In addition to understanding their process and timeline to fit into it, you can consider your own preferred processes and approaches and find ways to gently infuse them where permitted. For example, you can request different timelines for the conversations you are having if you need particular information earlier. You can ask to speak to procurement sooner than typical to get a sense of what their interests are before a full proposal is produced and begin to build rapport while you are working on the deal specifics with the end user. If you know the final decision maker is expected to make a decision based on a proposal translated by their direct report with whom you are talking, you could ask for an opportunity to include the decision maker more directly. Even though we are often beholden to the process laid before us, we can offer approaches that have been successful for us in the past that could impact the outcome favorably.

4)    WHAT? INFORMATION

We know that having good data and information can make all the difference for proposing the solution that fits best. As such, a critical preparation step is to assess what you understand and create a list of questions to uncover what is missing for each meeting. Often it is better to have open-ended questions when in information gathering mode so you are not leading them to a conclusion and closing off exploration. 

Prior to initial discussions, asking discovery questions about process, key interests, challenges, what success looks like, what has worked in the past, and their view of best solutions is useful. Once you are in the thick of the negotiation discussion, having some questions ready to dig and uncover more motivations and perspectives can be valuable: How does this particular option meet their interests? What doesn’t work with this proposed solution? Where did that number they suggest come from? This is important so you can verify its legitimacy as fair criteria and make sure it is persuasive to the decision makers on both sides. A healthy dose of curiosity can do wonders to open up the conversation, allow the parties to really explore the opportunity, uncover what is critical for the best result, all while building a better relationship.

Taking a little time to plan by contemplating the Why, Who, How, and What just might give you the edge you need for some early wins in your sales negotiations. Give one a try this week to see what results you can create and let us know how it goes. We would love to hear from you!