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.

Mladen Kresic’s Article to Help You Achieve Greater Success in 2020

December 30, 2019

How to Craft a Pitch that Stands Out, was published at Forbes.com last week. Mladen discussed the circumstances under which you should attempt to sell to a customer who has an established vendor - and when to walk away. Specifically, he outlines four factors that, when addressed properly, can lead to a successful outcome. Read the article and let’s have a conversation about how to make sure your sales negotiation efforts are rewarded in 2020.

Seven Sales Negotiation Resolutions for the New Year

December 17, 2019

We are at the end of one year and soon, the start of another. A great time to reflect on what we have accomplished, and more important, what we can do to make the next year even better, especially when it comes to revenue and profitability. And if any part of your job involves sales or business negotiations, what better time to reflect upon how a few changes can make a big difference in your business success in the coming year. It’s an area where a small (but strategic) investment can pay big dividends. Here are seven negotiation resolutions that will serve you and your organization well in the coming year: What is the process you will need to go through to make a decision? How long does it normally take? What criteria will be used to make the decision? Resolve to stop rushing…

How to Keep Your Cool - Even in Tense Negotiations

August 5, 2019

I have written quite a bit about how to sharpen you and your team’s professional negotiation skills to close larger deals, faster. However, there are many times professionals lose otherwise quality deals because the seller, the buyer or both, can’t keep their calm when the discussion becomes tense. We have recently seen a client get so emotional in a discussion that the other side would have walked away had cooler heads not prevailed. Rudyard Kipling talked about this as a virtue in his famous poem If: "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Great aspiration, but how to accomplish this with rude, inflexible and humorless negotiators? What if they are even downright nasty? Consider this scene: The chief negotiator for Dewey, Cheatum…

Properly Manage Internal Expectations

April 25, 2019

Almost every sales organization and every seller operates under some pressure associated with quantifying and then making their sales numbers. The instincts that cause this are positive – the desire to succeed by meeting or exceeding quota, or perhaps to be seen as a top performer within the sales organization. There are three related manifestations of this pressure that negatively impact the seller’s ability to deal with complex buy cycles. We may raise expectations of success with internal management on deals where some of the fundamentals are missing or will take more time to develop. Such expectations can be made through forecasting in the CRM system or by what sales reps promise to their managers. Regardless of how this occurs, not taking reality into account affects the seller’s…

Sell Impact or Don’t Sell at All

March 14, 2019

Negotiation Example: Seeing K&R’s ViO™ Formula in Action At our BrightTALK Sales Expert webinar last month, I spoke about Six Ways to Shorten the Sales Cycle – you can listen to the replay here. One of my key strategies is to make sure that you always sell solutions that impact the customer’s business. Unfortunately, in the rush to close, sellers often forget that. It’s not enough that you know/feel that you are going to have a positive impact – your prospect or customer must also accept this premise. The more the prospect believes that your solution lines up with their company’s own business objectives, the more likely you are to get a positive response to your sales efforts. In fact, the goal is to gain so much alignment that the entire process seems more like…

Your Three Rewards from Effective Sales Negotiations

January 25, 2019

I’m occasionally asked by clients or business colleagues: “What actions can I take that will have the biggest effect on my top line (revenue) or bottom line (profit)?” This is a great question and cannot be oversimplified. After all, no two companies are alike, and each set of solutions has different competition, sales ecosystems, etc. However, there are concepts that are true for any organization regardless of circumstance. The short answer to the above question is to infuse the entire sales organization with the insights, strategies and techniques of effective sales negotiations. I answer this way because I have experienced and seen hundreds of millions of dollars in deals that have been achieved because individuals from reps, to sales managers, to CSOs and other…