Inside Our Head

Preparation is important, but it’s not everything. You also need to understand how to work effectively during the heat of the moment when you are confronted with a skilled negotiator.

Specifically, you should understand the guidelines for effective negotiations and conduct your activities in accordance with them—listening for your customer’s interests, creating innovative win/win alternatives, and gaining commitment.

The negotiation will begin in earnest when your buyer presents a demand. The first demand is often an extreme one. At precisely this moment, many salespeople make a big mistake: they immediately react. As human beings, when someone pushes us, our knee-jerk response is to push back. When we push back, we react emotionally in some way. We either confront and “fight it out,” or we concede immediately in order to end the conflict. Either way, it is bad for us.

Salespeople need to change their attitude about a buyer’s initial demand. Don’t confront it, welcome it. Tom Crum, the author of The Magic of Conflict, says we need to change how we respond to confrontation. Crum uses the martial art of Aikido as a metaphor for handling conflict. The purpose of Aikido is to render an attack harmless without harming the attacker. This is the result you want from your sales negotiations.

In Aikido, you handle an attack by moving toward the source of the attack, not away from it. Think about it. A punch is relatively harmless if your face is two inches away from your attacker. Another example might be how you regain control of your car in a skid. You turn your wheels toward the skid, not away from it. You go with the energy, not against it.

When presented with an unrealistic demand in a sales negotiation, don’t dig in and fight. Instead, use indirect action, the opposite of what your buyer thinks you’ll do (and what you feel like doing). Accept their demand as a positive development.

An executive I know told me recently that a new vice president of sales had joined his firm the previous summer and launched a process to hire a new sales training firm.

The SVP’s preference was for a company he had experience working with. He and the decision-making team evaluated that firm and one other company (neither of which was mine). They went thru their Research and Comparison steps, requested in-person presentations, and then got the sales proposals.

Their first choice wanted over $2 million! Ouch! They decided to delay the purchase since they didn’t have $2 million in the budget. That delay gave me time to get back in the door.

What’s ironic about the two companies that lost out is that the sales methods they teach includes an early step of defining if the budget had been approved for this investment. Not only had the budget not been approved in this case, but the customer had no clue how much the solution would cost. And yet both sales training companies proceeded with the sales process, flying teams thousands of miles to deliver big presentations. What a waste.

Most salespeople include in their approach call a "benefit statement," which is two or three generic customer benefits that attempt to create interest so the prospect agrees to an initial appointment. But the vast majority of prospects you call are either in the Change or Discontent steps when you call them.

They may or may not be aware they have a problem, which is nowhere near having the kind of explicit need for a solution that would allow them to respond positively to your pitch.

Describing benefits is a match for customers’ state of mind much later in the buying process, in the Comparison step. In talking about benefits off the bat, you’re out of sync, steps ahead of your customer—and, unfortunately for you, buyers rarely skip steps.