Successful, Hollywood-style, sales negotiators always construct negotiations such that they stay in a calm state; any outburst that happens could thus compromise the sale (if reached), as well as future potential relationships with prospective customers.
Negotiation is an essential soft skill. When done right, it helps the sales person create a win-win deal. Here are some proven negotiation strategies that your sales rep can leverage the next time around to close the deal.
Stay calm and composed
Under pressure, emotions may obscure judgment, but effective sales negotiators stay cool under pressure, allowing them to make good decisions in an uncertain situation and walk away with a successful deal.
The ability to stay calm enables you to be flexible and creative in how to respond to those challenges, perhaps finding mutual trades or win-win solutions – for example, clients might ask you to lower the cost of your product; but in return your customers might be happy to buy additional support services.
Active listening is another potent technique for managing your demeanour in negotiations: it helps develop empathy, which is vital to glean cues for building rapport with your client and then calibrating your messaging so that it resonates with their own frame of mind and emotions. It also encourages free-flowing conversations and reduces antagonism. One example technique is mirroring, which invokes active listening and involves rephrasing what your prospect says, or copying their body language, to signal to them that you’re really engaged in the conversation.
Identify decision-makers
You might find that, when push comes to shove, knowing who will have the last word – you or the counterparty you’re negotiating with – can be the difference between getting a World Series deal or a Triple-A contract. For instance, the salesperson hoping to tear up a buyer contract while on the way to the airport was advised that the two open-ended answers and noncommittal counterpoints indicated that he had zero authority: the counterparty, had she so desired, could have walked away from him.
To start, sales reps can build trust by reviewing common ground before a negotiation, which will promote co‑operation and create an environment conducive to mutual success.
Sellers should also be armed to share yardsticks, benchmark reports and other data to help prevent buyers from panicking when making offers and ready to recalibrate if and when that’s helpful in getting the returns required by all to reach a fair close.
Create win-win scenarios
A simple, but effective, negotiating strategy is to create win-win.Not to be rude or insult your competition in your sales meetings.But to position your product or service in a way that solves their problem.
Make concessions as part of a Leverage Plan to win-win deals. Make concessions because you want to, not because you have to — concessions are powerful tools for moving deals into win-win situations without sacrificing profit.
Additionally, you need to learn exactly when to concede, and when to walk away if negotiations reach an impasse. Simply cut your losses – even though it can feel like defeat – and save time and energy in the long-term, especially when the other with whom you are dealing does not share your views and values.
Recognize when negotiations have reached an impasse
While it’s important for you to cede a little ground in the area of compromis to make a sale, sometimes you reach an impasse and negotiations are simply at an end. Knowing when you should try to end negotiations might empower you to walk away, which can turn a dead-end into more possibilities, and often less time and energy between you and a closed sale.
Impasse can be overcome by naming this basic causality, and attempting to resolve the underlying cause, say, if one of the parties feels ill-used by the other and believes that their needs are unrecognised (and is right), then building a different kind of trust through communication can help. Or, parties can be additionally asked about what a win would look like for them, prior to introducing options for what would solve the problem – this process of framing the problem is a particular boon when working with value disputes.
Walk away
After all, negotiations, at least in theory, is supposed to produce a win-win. So make sure that you earn your fee by being useful rather than contributing to your client being hoodwinked into a deal that doesn’t benefit both parts to the same extent. Defining your walk-away point – and firmly outlining the rules of the road – going into an engagement will help to make sure that, when the time is right, you truly can walk away.5. Partner is more than a title. It’s a true colleague. Consider the unfortunate button-pusher and early adopter of pedometers. Let’s ignore the nanotechnology for now and take it at face value – the promise that your new fastener will help you achieve that out-of-reach goal of 150 steps a day from your sit-all job. And, try as you might, every button you push each hour of the day only moves you three ticks closer to the monthly prize you trust will soon make everything better. You might not have been born yesterday, but you start to believe anybody who can make that dream come true. So what does an attorney do? She finds a partner – someone whose focus enables her to learn something new, and to save her behind while she’s at it. By this account of success, there’s only one champ.
Imagine your customer tries to bargain that price down, instead of getting irritated and bargaining it further, turn the conversation towards the way they can serve to fulfill their needs without any changes to you on your side. Maybe it’s via some kind of post-purchase support; or maybe you just bring the entire conversation back to the fact that they want to succeed.