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.
Sales Negotiator Training: Better Forecasting Closes More Deals
Sales forecasting is a critical activity for any team, but many companies have a hard time getting it right. Business pressures or subjective measures - emotions and opinion - often have too much weight, and distort the process. For business leaders who want to give their teams a dependable way of analyzing deals so they can focus on activities that will result in more closes, sales negotiator training should include some aspect of sales forecasting.
Most sales or negotiation training focuses on the process, rather than the "why" and "how." Yet this process delivers more repeatable success if we know how to analyze and predict the outcomes of our sales opportunities. Some of the most critical negotiation work happens during analysis and preparation - long before we discuss pricing and…
Six Principles Every International Negotiator Must Know: A Divided Team is a Costly Team
This is the sixth post in a series entitled: The Principles of International Negotiation: Finding Universal Value in a Complex World
As many have learned, cracking the united front of a negotiation team can yield prized concessions. As with a teenager who knows how to play one parent against another to get permissions and privileges, the party across the negotiation table will pick your team apart if given a chance. Even if it’s an opportunity they don’t take, disunity can severely damage your credibility, and prolong or sometimes cripple negotiations. In an international environment, where team members can often be in different time zones, keeping a unified voice is a particular challenge.
A Negotiation Example
In a key negotiation meeting with a Japanese buyer, our team firmly held…
The Six Principles Every International Negotiator Must Know - Protect Your Weaknesses, Utilize Theirs
This is the fifth post in a series entitled: The Principles of International Negotiation: Finding Universal Value in a Complex World
Employing this principle begins with a clear-eyed assessment of your negotiation team’s weaknesses. Be brutally honest with yourself in evaluating how critical factors like tight deadlines, lack of patience, insufficient alternatives, lack of understanding of the customer, poor cash flow, or product credibility issues might affect your position. Poor teamwork is another weakness, making a team susceptible to divide-and-conquer tactics by the other side. Teamwork is so important that it is the subject of our third principle of negotiation. We will discuss that in detail in our next post.
When assessing a negotiation team's strengths, the three most important…
Negotiation Examples: The Power of “Face”
"Face" is a person’s standing in the eyes of others. In negotiations, that means looking good to each negotiation side, peers, management, spouse and family. It avoids putting someone in an awkward position that could humiliate or embarrass them, particular with a direct confrontation. When confronted negatively, negotiations can quickly deteriorate. However, giving someone "face" makes them feel good and helps form good business relationships.
A Business Negotiation Example - Saving "Face"
At K&R Negotiations, we have extensive experience in business negotiations. We’ve collected numerous negotiation skills examples from a wide variety of business negotiations. Here’s an illustration of saving face from our collection of negotiation examples.
We were representing…
Six Principles Every International Negotiator Must Know: M.O.R.E.
This is the fourth post in a series entitled: The Principles of International Negotiation: Finding Universal Value in a Complex World
In our two previous posts on international negotiation, we discussed the importance of P&L (Patience and Listening) and the dynamics of credibility and leverage. One is a practice, the second is a conceptual understanding. They are interlocking and dependent. Patience and listening yield trust and information. Trust and information help us generate credibility and leverage - the two things you must have if you want to negotiate successfully.
What are some other ways to generate credibility and leverage? Over decades of collective experience as international negotiators, K&R has formulated six principles that serve as a guide to the fundamentals…
Negotiation Examples: Diffusing Intimidating Tactics
Negotiation Tactics Versus Gamesmanship
Negotiation tactics are techniques or actions intended to influence a negotiation. However negotiation gamesmanship consists of techniques or actions, unrelated to the merits of the transaction, used to gain an advantage in a negotiation. Thus, gamesmanship is a subset of tactics. For example, yelling, screaming, intimidation or walking out are types of gamesmanship tactics.
Why Understand Negotiation Games?
Gamesmanship is not for everyone, but all negotiators should recognize and understand these tactics. Gamesmanship as a tactic is used to cause confusion, intimidate, accelerate or improved leverage or momentum. Thus it’s a key skill to recognize gamesmanship tactics when they occur so that the skilled negotiator can deal with them.
Some…
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Creating Value-Based Leverage
In this short video, learn why negotiation is really the art of finding agreement.
Mladen Kresic introduces the concept of value-based negotiations leverage and why it is a powerful tool for moving conversations to an agreement.
