Insights on Business and Sales Negotiations

Nogotiation Blog

Insights on Business and Sales Negotiation

Join us for insights on how to negotiate a winning balance, where where both sides understand and appreciate the value they receive. As a result, you are more likely to forge a long-lasting relationship that yields more and better opportunities in the future. This idea underpins K&R Negotiations’ Win Wisely™ approach and underlines the importance of using leverage wisely.

To Win And Secure Client Relationships, Add Personal Value

June 17, 2025

At my negotiation firm, we have often written about the topic of personal value since it is so important to effective negotiation strategies, particularly in a B2B environment. The ability to communicate clearly and persuasively is fundamental to winning profitable deals and building strong client relationships. When you are understood and believed, you can greatly increase your chances of securing positive leverage based on the value you provide to the other side. As business leaders, we frequently view value as something our business does for our counterparts. However, we sell ourselves short if our communication doesn’t demonstrate at least two kinds of value: Company value for them. Personal value to their representatives. You generate company value by making the deal…

Overcoming Six Common Negotiation Challenges

November 16, 2024

Part One: Challenges 1-3 The late Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s long-time partner, observed, “Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.” Many negotiation skills I practice and teach are intuitive and pragmatic, yet effective only if based upon a firm foundation of work and knowledge. Every negotiation is different in terms of its scope and details. However, whether you are discussing something as major as a merger of Fortune 500 companies, or as minor as a product delivery schedule, there are a number of common challenges you will likely face as well as some repeatable strategies on how to neutralize them. Let’s discuss three of these challenges related to personalities. Challenge One: Dealing with a Know-It-All. There are three types of know-it-all…

Break Four Bad Listening Habits to Become a More Skilled Negotiator

March 22, 2024

Completing a winning deal, while maintaining positive relationships, depends largely on your ability to gather as much information as possible about the other side, including their market position, motivations, and goals. This holds true at the personal, departmental, and organizational levels. Better and more complete information can lead to a finely tuned value argument and increased credibility, both of which mean greater leverage that will help you close and achieve positive relationships. Behind-the-scenes research with your team as you prepare to negotiate is a vital aspect of information gathering; the rest is gleaned from how you engage the other side in conversation. This may seem almost too basic to mention, but we are still surprised to see many seasoned professionals who don’t…

Negotiate Wisely: Stop the Revenue Leakage Due to Unprincipled Concessions

October 8, 2023

Over the decades as the K&R team have assisted leading companies achieve business and sales negotiation success, the subject of ”unprincipled concessions” has been a constant. Simply put, unprincipled concessions are those that are not tied to a credible business rationale. Research shows that this simple business negotiation mistake can (and has) cost companies between nine and eighteen percent of their dealmaking revenues. The below graphic illustrates why unprincipled negotiations are such an important issue. Let’s discuss the problem and what you and your team can do to make this a non-factor in your negotiations. The most common example of an unprincipled negotiation concession is this: To test you and your resolve, the client asks for a large up-front discount. Wanting…

K&R Negotiation Associates: Our Guiding Philosophy Revisited

February 14, 2023

Everything we do at K&R Negotiation is based on our philosophy, honed over several decades of helping the world’s leading companies achieve successful sales and business negotiation outcomes. We last shared this philosophy in late 2018 and it is time for a refresh. While some negotiations can be adversarial, negotiations as a defined business activity should be viewed as a positive process. The word negotiation itself often creates a lump in the throat if you are automatically inclined to picture tense standoffs, intimidation, manipulation, or a zero-sum game in which one side wins and the other side loses. Here is a better perspective: Negotiations are simply interactions between or among parties to bring about agreement. This in itself should be positive rather than adversarial. Negotiations…

Negotiating Contracts In A Volatile Economic Environment

January 3, 2023

For firms delivering services on long-term contracts, rising inflation has hit like a sledgehammer. The inability to raise rates due to resource rate or fixed price commitments threatens to jeopardize profitability as wages escalate by as much as 15%. Contracts signed before 2022 are in danger of becoming unprofitable, while competition for new business requires balancing price competition with intelligent contracting. If a vendor loses money on long-term contracts, this is also dangerous for the client. Failure to charge profitable rates can cause vendors to either lose money or cut the number or quality of resources, both of which jeopardize the quality of service—and potentially the customer’s own business. So, what can be done when the terms of a contract inhibit or prevent…