Negotiators Know The Power Of Not Making Up Your Mind

I hate to negotiate with people who don’t know how to negotiate. Knowing this you might think that I’m always expecting the other side to be on top of things, know what they want and have a plan on how they are going to get there. It turns out that you’d be wrong – sometimes … Read more

Why It’s Ok For A Sales Negotiator To Be Wrong

When you become the best sales negotiator in the world you’ll be right all the time. However, since you’re not there yet, you should expect to be wrong – not all the time, but at least some of the time. There are a lot of different ways to handle this, what’s the right way? Why … Read more

Sales Negotiators Know That It’s Ok To Not Understand Things

One of the great myths of sales negotiating is that you always have to know everything about everything. It turns out that even the great negotiators can’t do this. There are a whole bunch of reasons why, but the important fact is that it’s not possible to always be on top of everything. It’s what … Read more

Sales Negotiators Know That Authority Looks Different Around The World

When you sit down to conduct a sales negotiation, you need to be assured that the people sitting on the other side of the table have been granted the authority by their company or organization to reach a deal with you. Under normal circumstances this can hard enough to do; however, when the other side … Read more

Prove It!: 5 Techniques For Determining How Much Authority The Other Side Really Has

What’s your most valuable resource? You might have said money, but I’m willing to bet that it’s really something else – time. You can always earn more money, but once you spend time on some task, it’s gone, gone, gone. That’s why when you are negotiating with someone it is critical that you quickly get … Read more

How To Control What Gets Discussed During A Sales Negotiation

Are you familiar with the “shell game”? You know, it’s the one that they show in the movies all the time where the street hustler sets up a table with three shells of some sort on it. He proceeds to put a pea under one of the shells, shuffles them, and then asks passers by … Read more

5 Ways To Determine How Much Authority The Other Side Really Has

What’s your most valuable resource? You might have said money, but I’m willing to bet that it’s really something else – time. You can always earn more money, but once you spend time on some task, it’s gone, gone, gone. That’s why when you are negotiating with someone it is critical that you quickly get … Read more

Going Up? How Sales Negotiators Deal With Escalation

Just when you think that you’ve got everything nailed down in a sales negotiation, you just might run into the issue of escalating authority. Sure you’ve reached a deal with the other side of the table, but then all of a sudden somebody else gets involved and it turns out that they don’t like your … Read more

The Challenges Of Negotiating Internationally

Got a great email from reader Nadir Benouali the other evening. Nadir has a fantastic set of negotiating experiences and was willing to share them. Nadir is a US citizen of Algerian origin, and speaks Arabic, Spanish, and French. The last 20 years have been spent negotiating business around the world which provided exposure to … Read more

Sales Negotiators Need To Know How To Wait

When we start a sales negotiation, we have certain expectations about how it’s going to go. If we’re selling something, then we believe that the other side will state what they are interested in buying, we’ll have some discussions and we’ll eventually provide them with a proposal. We then expect them to react to the … Read more