Which Is More Valuable When Negotiating - Attitude or Aptitude?

When you think about any kind of capability, you might wonder which is more beneficial – your mindset or your skill set. Either is a possible measure of success and both bring a different focus for how to improve. When it comes to negotiating, we can ask the same question. Which is more valuable – attitude or aptitude?

Is Your Sales Team Negotiating Value? How Do You know?

Assess nine factors to see where you can make improvements to your sales teams’ selling and negotiation approaches. If you cannot respond about your team to at least six or seven of the factors with “we do this very well,” then there are likely additional gross margin dollars to be captured through better selling and negotiating.

Strategic Convergence of Negotiation and Sales

Negotiation as a transformational tool is essential for sales executives as they manage their sales forces, as they manage internal negotiations with all business functions within their organizations, and as they manage the critical customer relationships they seek to broaden, deepen and enrich.

A New Icon for Negotiating

Negotiations can be broken down into four essential components: Interests, Criteria, Options, and No-Agreement Alternatives (ICON). Applied successfully, the ICON framework can help to create breakthrough results in any negotiation by helping participant move away from confrontation and towards collaboration.

Take Stock BEFORE That Negotiation Meeting

Preparation, preparation, preparation is the backbone of creating the most value possible for all parties in a negotiation, especially for you.

Internal Negotiations - Supporting the External Deal

Negotiators devote significant training and preparation effort to their external negotiations: with customers, suppliers, partners and competitors. Yet in our experience training salespeople, account managers, and regulatory team members we have seen that, often, internal negotiations make or break the external deals. Too often, however, they are short-changed due to emphasis on the external deal.

Why Selling on Value — and Negotiating on Price — Does Not Work

Like many account executives, we can look back on many training sessions in which we were urged to sell value. One course that one of the authors attended had the descriptive (if not imaginative) title "How to sell at higher prices than your competitor…”