In order to be a successful sales negotiator you need to be able to walk away with the lowest prices when you engage in a negotiation. As you might suspect, the key is how you get there. Having multiple tactics that you can use is your ticket to success. The Krunch tactic is a classic tool that every sales negotiator needs to know how to use — and how to defend against.
How To Use The Krunch Tactic
So I can hear you asking “what is this krunch tactic thing and how I can I put it to use for me?” Simply put, the krunch tactic is a negotiating method that a buyer can use to get a lower price out of a seller.
Here’s how it works. The buyer will ask several sellers to quote him a price on what he wants to buy. Once he collects several prices, he then goes back to everyone that he collected a price from and tells them that their price is too high, could they take another look and come back with a lower price?
Note that the subtlety here is that the buyer is even going back to the seller who did provide the lowest price and he’s asking them to provide an even lower price also. This technique is so fiendishly powerful because none of the sellers knows what the other seller’s price is and so they all assume that everyone else has quoted a lower price than they did.
The krunch tactic plays on the insecurity of sellers worldwide. Every salesperson believes that the price that they are quoting is too high and that no buyer will ever make a purchase at that price. When the buyer comes back and tells them that their price is too high, this just serves to confirm what they had always feared: they are charging too much for their product.
How To Defend Against The Krunch Tactic
From a negotiating perspective, it would sure seem as though nobody would ever want to find themselves in the role of seller in a negotiating situation. However, that’s not the case.
Smart sellers come to know when the other side of the table is a krunch tactic user. If they know this going into a sales negotiation, then they can prepare themselves for it by simply boosting their initial offer. Realizing that they are going to be asked to come down in price, they simply start higher so that they’ll still end up where they want to be in the end.
In the case that a buyer gets his or her way by using the krunch tactic, the seller still has other options that they can use. These include changing what gets delivered as part of the deal. The quality of what is being bought can go down, the quantity that is offered can be decreased, and when it actually gets delivered can be stretched out to better fit with the seller’s schedule.
Smart sellers don’t just roll over when the buyer starts to apply the krunch tactic. Instead, they start to ask questions. They probe to find out what the correct price is from the buyers point-of-view. They also try to determine why the buyer thinks that they should lower their price – aren’t you offering higher quality, better terms, etc.?
What All Of This Means For You
In sales negotiations, the krunch tactic is a classic negotiating tactic that is used by buyers to get sellers to lower their prices. It’s very simple to use and yet at the same time it is very effective.
To use the krunch tactic a buyer simply has to collect bids from multiple sellers and then turn around and go back to them to inform them that their bids were too high and that they need to submit a new bid with a lower price. Sellers are often all too willing to comply.
Sellers quickly learn when a buyer is using this tactic and can boost their initial offer to counter this tactic. In the end, the krunch tactic is only effective if you use it when it best suits the negotiating circumstances – when you absolutely must have a lower price from the sellers. Knowing how to use more negotiating tactics like the kruch tactic will make you a better sales negotiator.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™
Question For You: How do you think you should react when someone starts to use the krunch tactic on you?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
You may or may not realize it, but the other side of the table in a sales negotiation might be as smart or even smarter than you are. I say this not to make you worried, but rather to make sure that you remain aware throughout the entire negotiation. A good example of this is the old “give and take” technique – just when you think that you are ahead, you may find yourself way behind all of a sudden …