In order to be successful in your next sales negotiation, you need to make the right decisions before you sit down to start negotiating. If you take the time to make the right decisions then you can end up being successful.
It’s not only the person who is leading the negotiation that you need to select. However, you also have to make the right decisions about the other people who will be on your team. This is probably the most effective way to stack the deck in your favor during a negotiation.
Picking A Negotiation Leader
If there is one decision that can determine the outcome of a sales negotiation, it’s who you select to lead your side of the negotiation. There are a lot of characteristics that you should be looking for in your team’s leader.
The person that you want to have leading your team has to have two sets of characteristics: negotiating skills and team leadership. Just like a quarterback in football, your lead negotiator will be calling the plays that the rest of the negotiating team will be executing.
Choose Your Team
After you’ve decided who is going to lead your side of the negotiation team, you’ve still got a lot of work left to do. Your next task is to choose the rest of your negotiating team.
Just like putting the rest of a sports team together, you’re going to want to build your team so that it will be able to support its leader. Each team member needs to bring their own set of skills in order to support the rest of the team.
Supporting Roles
Good leaders know that they are only as good as the team that is supporting them. When it comes to negotiating, the two most important supporting roles are the listener and the note taker.
The outcome of any sales negotiation is ultimately determined by the quality of the information that your team has. The members of your team who are responsible for listening to everything that is said and writing it down are how you’ll be able to stay on top of what is going on.
There Is Strength In Numbers
In order for your next sales negotiation to be a success, you are going to have to make sure that you have enough (but not too many) people on your team. The key will be to match the other side of the table.
If you don’t have enough people sitting on your side of the negotiating table than you’re potentially going to find yourself overwhelmed. Likewise, if you find yourself with too many people on your side of table and not enough on the other side then the other side may decide to not negotiate with you.
It’s All About Time
Having the right people on your team to successfully negotiate your next deal is an important component of being successful. However, you’ll need more than just warm bodies. You’ll also have to have time on your side.
This means that the members of your negotiation team need to have enough time to do a good job of negotiating. If they are distracted by some other task or if they are trying to do multiple things at the same time, then they’re not going to have enough time to do a good job of getting you the best deal possible.
What All Of This Means For You
Any modern sales negotiation is generally not done by a single negotiator – it takes a team. That means that if you want to be successful, then you need to make sure that you take the time to build the best team possible.
The first thing that you need to do is pick a great leader. Next, the supporting team members who will collect the information for that leader need to be selected. Finally, you need to make sure that your negotiating team is large enough, but not too large.
It is possible to have a successful sales negotiation. However, to boost your chances of reaching a deal that meets your needs, you need to take the time before the negotiations start to build a negotiation team that will put success within your grasp before the negotiation even starts…
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™
Question For You: What role on a negotiating team do you think is the most important?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Sometimes it’s the littlest of things that can trip up even a professional sales negotiator. In this case, we often don’t want to ask the one question that we need to ask the other side of the table:”how much does that cost”. In the end, this can end up costing us a great deal…