How to Win Your Sales Negotiations without Negotiating

We receive a lot of requests from companies looking to provide negotiation skills training for their salespeople.  To me, requests for negotiating skills are a lot like requests for time management training.  While there may certainly be a few disorganized people on the sales team, in the case of time management, it is almost always a symptom of something else. Why put an entire team through training on a topic for which most of them don’t need any help? 

I like to ask what it is that salespeople must do but never seem to have enough time to complete.  Can you guess?  It’s always the same answer…

…It’s prospecting and it is not so much a time management problem as it is a call reluctance problem.  Training might not be the answer to that problem either.  Training would surely help with ineffective prospecting, but call reluctance is the result of 4 potential Sales DNA weaknesses:

• Need to be Liked
• Difficulty recovering from rejection
• Dislike / unwillingness to make cold calls
• Procrastination from Perfectionism

Any combination of these four weaknesses can cause everything from delayed starts to outright refusal of prospecting activities.  Effective sales coaching can help, but more often, the solution is to put salespeople like this in a more appropriate role – like account management – or have a top of the funnel team set appointments and meetings for them.

If a time management problem is often call reluctance in disguise, then what could cause a need for better negotiation skills?

This symptom is usually the result of:

• Ineffective and/or inconsistent sales process
• Failure to thoroughly qualify the opportunity – especially on budget and terms
• Failure to establish that the customer will pay more to do business with you
• Failure to uncover a compelling reason to buy from you
• Failure to establish yourself as a trusted advisor
• Failure to quantify their compelling reason
• Failure to create urgency
• Failure get agreement on your solution
• Failure to get verbal agreement on your proposal prior to writing the proposal

When any combination of these milestones are missed – and they are often missed – it leads to proposals and/or quotes that rely on guesswork instead of facts, assumptions instead of agreements, and hope instead of acceptance.  When salespeople send proposals to their prospects, they hope that the proposal will do the selling for them but it causes one of four things to happen instead.

1. The prospect does not respond to the proposal and the salesperson goes into chase mode
2. The salesperson is told that their price is too high and invited to revise it
3. The salesperson is told that their prospect is interested but the proposal needs to be modified relative to pricing, terms, etc.
4. The proposal is accepted

Prospects use scenario #2 as leverage to drive down prices of their preferred vendor – your competitor – while scenario #3 causes executives to believe that their salespeople require better negotiating skills.

If salespeople can learn to sell the proper way, they would never be in a scenario where negotiation skills are even required.