How to Be a Better Negotiator by Refusing to Negotiate

I hate negotiating.  I hate it so much that I not only refuse to negotiate, I refuse to train salespeople to negotiate despite the fact that among all of the training requests we hear at Kurlan & Associates, the second most popular request negotiation skills.  In case you were wondering, the most popular request is for training on closing skills but closing is overrated and we will discuss that in another article.

“No sales team, in any industry, calling on any audience, in any size company needs or should be given negotiation skills training.”  Dave Kurlan

The need to negotiate is a symptom of a combination of sales competencies in which a salesperson is weak. But what is negotiating, really?  It’s when the buyer wants to negotiate better terms and prices which is nothing more than arriving at the difference between caving to customer price demands and making a discount palatable.  But why are you discounting at all?

When they appear as strengths, four of the 21 Sales Core Competencies alleviate discounting and negotiating altogether:

1. Consultative Selling
2. Value Selling
3. Reaching Decision Makers
4. Qualifying

When salespeople fail to uncover the compelling reasons why a prospect will buy from them, there is no urgency to buy, buy now, get the decision maker engaged, or get money approved.  When there is urgency, everything changes.

When salespeople don’t meet with decision makers, the decision maker tasks their subordinate to “get a better price” but generally won’t make that push when the salesperson meets with them directly.

When salespeople are ineffective selling value, price and discounts replace value in the conversation.  When salespeople are effective selling value, and they do so in the context of a consultative conversation with a decision maker, value rules over price.

Finally, when a salesperson doesn’t thoroughly qualify their prospect and the opportunity, it opens the door for a future negotiation.  On the other hand, salespeople who are thorough during qualification, gain agreement that the customer has and will spend the required amount of money to do business with them.

With a proper approach to selling, executed effectively, everything is agreed to well in advance of a proposal leaving nothing to negotiate.

Of course, this is easier said than done.

According to Objective Management Group’s (OMG) data from the assessments of nearly 2.4 million salespeople, those four competencies are not the ones in which salespeople are the strongest.  See the table below, which shows the percentage of salespeople who are strong in each competency.

We can learn three things from this data:

1. Even the top 5% struggle to sell consultatively, but they are still 2500% better at it than the bottom 50%. 
2. The top 5% are so strong in the other 3 competencies that they rarely need to negotiate anything,
3. Most salespeople are so ineffective in all 4 competencies that they usually have to negotiate everything.

Would you like to be a better negotiator?  Stop negotiating and be obsessive about developing the four competencies above.  All it takes is training, coaching and role-playing.