Negotiation Skills Training Workshops
With
over twenty-five years of proven industry experience, the
Negotiations
Training Institute of America is the recognized leader in negotiations
training, consulting and performance coaching. Through public open
enrollment workshops and private on-session training sessions, we
have helped leading corporations, non-profit organizations and governmental
agencies improve their ability to
negotiate
better outcomes for their constituencies.
First-time
negotiators as well as those with the greatest
competitive
drive and amount of first-hand experience and
negotiations
wisdom can benefit from our time-tested workshops. Whether focusing
on
negotiating
a contract with a vendor or jumping in to the often-stressful
car buying process to
deal
with a dealership, our classes provide useful skills, proven techniques
and various classroom role plays to help you
become
more aware of negotiations that you must face on a daily basis.
For more information on our negotiation skills training workshops please
contact us.
The Key to Good Sales Negotiations Workshop: Eliminate Failure
Probably the most often heard objection from customer’s centers around the issue on price.
In my November issue, I mentioned that (apart from habitual bargaining) the main reason customers want to hack down the price is that they don't see how the value you provide justifies the (high) price they are paying.
However, justifying and educating customers on the value of you’re offering to be worth more than the price you are charging is just part of the answer to good sales negotiation. If you want to emerge as a winner in the sales negotiating game, you'd also have to eliminate the causes of bad negotiation too.
Are You Doing Enough Prospecting?
While most sales training materials will focus on objection handling techniques when it comes to handling price objections, it does not address the fundamental issues of negotiations. When negotiating, you may want to know what is your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA), which in simple English, what will happen if you don't accept the negotiation outcome placed on the table.
To sales people, the options are:
Close a deal, but at smaller profits and smaller commissions;
Close a deal at no profits and no commissions, but still able to achieve sales quotas
Close a deal at a loss, but will make it up on the next deal, so that there will be profits for the account in aggregate
As you can see, this is a slippery slope for sales people who may just bend over backwards and give anything away just to make the sale. Now, what will be the root cause of such behavior in sales people?
It is NOT because they have high sales targets to achieve, or that the sales person does not know how to apply objection handling techniques. The reason is that the sales person is not prospecting enough, and does not have enough prospects in the pipeline.
In the November issue, I mentioned that customers buy because "the pain of not buying is greater than the pain of giving the money to the sales person and buy". Similarly, sales people are unable to stand up against price pressures can also be largely due to the pain of not closing and losing the business is greater than the pain of sustaining losses in order to close the deal.
And what causes the sales person to feel a greater pain to lose a business? Burgeoning sales targets may be the reason, but a bigger reason is that there aren't many leads in the pipeline to follow through, and hence the need to "close something, anything" will be greater than the need to deliver profits.
In fact in most companies, sales people may be fired immediately if sales targets are not reached, but may only be reprimanded if the sales generated are loss-making ones. Strange, but true.
Are You Prospecting for the Right Kinds of Customers?
While some sales people may be masters in the art of handling objections, no amount of objections handling expertise can save the deal if the customer wants nothing but lower prices.
While it is true that most customers are cost conscious, they too will have to accept that there are differences between the price of a product vs. the cost of purchasing. However, there are also customers that refuse to make distinctions in either, and will just buy the cheapest priced offer.
If most of your customers in your pipeline belong to this category, then you'd probably need to do better qualifying and filtering in your prospecting process. This is not to say we will find customers who will buy our products and services at any prices we dictate. I believe we aren't naive enough to wish for that.
What we need to look for are prospects who are at least willing to listen to us, just as we are willing to listen to them. This means that more work is required when prospecting for new customers.
Unfortunately, most sales people love to interact with customers, but simply HATE to prospect. Hence, the sales team who can make the discipline to prospect more, and prospect better, is going beat their competitors hands down.
Eliminating the Causes of Bad Sales Negotiation
While there are many other causes of bad sales negotiation, and how you start your sales process may just determine what you get in the end.
In addition to poor prospecting, the causes of bad negotiation include:
Poor questioning techniques that upset customers;
Not knowing what customers want;
Not knowing your customers' BATNA;
Poor understanding of the values that customers want (and need) from you;
Poor articulation of what you can do for your customer;
Following through with customers with low influence on the decision making; Not know what each influencer in the buying process wants to get out of the deal; etc.
The list goes on, but it starts with the beginning, that is have you got enough qualified prospects in your pipeline?
Source: C.J. Ng Link
For Negotiation
Skills Seminar information please
contact
us.
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