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 the Deal, Add Personal Value to Your Negotiation Strategy

May 4, 2015

Effective, persuasive communication is fundamental to building winning deals. When you are understood and believed, you greatly increase your chances of gaining leverage and having your value argument accepted by the other side. However, we make a mistake if our communication doesn’t recognize two kinds of value: Company value to the other side Personal value to the representative of the other side You generate company value by making the deal beneficial to the customer’s organization. This helps their company’s bottom line or revenues, improves their return on assets, expands market share, reduces costs, etc. In other words, their company is better off for doing the deal. Their corporate or organizational goals are achieved. But what about the individuals within…

K&R’s Mladen Kresic Contributes to Thomson Reuters' Legal Solutions Blog

February 12, 2015

Thomson Reuters’ Legal Solutions Blog recently featured a guest post from K&R Negotiations CEO Mladen Kresic, who penned a piece about the importance of lawyers not getting too lost in legal terms and keeping an eye on their client’s business value: “When brought on as the legal member of a business negotiation team, it’s natural that we view the process through a legal filter. But sometimes attorneys get lost in the purely legal dimensions of the negotiation process and lose sight of the fact that we are ultimately there to provide business value for our clients.” The post features an example of a negotiation in which K&R was involved—and in which one lawyer solved a business negotiation impasse by discovering and addressing the business value of the critical term…

Why Disruptive Deals Are So Difficult (And Why Yours Can Work)

January 28, 2015

In a 2012 Harvard Business Review article titled “The End of Solution Sales,” authors Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman identified a new way of selling being practiced by the cream of today’s sales professionals—usually B2B salespeople attempting to land complex deals. These prominent authors identified a small percentage engaged in what they call “insight selling.” In contrast to the classic “solution sale,” in which salespeople engage with purchase agents to discover salient needs and align their solution with those needs, this new breed of insight seller identifies needs that potential buyers may not even be aware of yet. They identify opportunities in areas of flux, offer “provocative insights” about the customers and their business models, and become…

Fighting for Your Value: The Negotiation Wisdom of Bernard Hopkins

January 6, 2015

On the eve of his November meeting with feared Russian light heavyweight Sergey "Krusher" Kovalev, the New York Times took a fascinating, in-depth look at the 49-year-old who was about to step in the ring against Kovalev: Philadelphia's Bernard Hopkins. It was a chance to learn about the hard-won wisdom and discipline that had made him not just an expert boxer who could seemingly defy time, but an expert businessman. Boxing is often called the "cruelest sport" for the punishment that boxers absorb in the ring. It's also financially unforgiving. The destinies of top fighters are managed by a handful of powerful and (sometimes) corrupt promoters. Even seemingly handsome six-figure paydays get gobbled up by managers, trainers and promoters. Only a few rise to wealth and fame, and many of these…

Do You Want to Be Successful? A Better Negotiator? Break These Three Bad Listening Habits

August 30, 2014

Forging a winning deal depends largely on your ability to gather as much information as possible about the other side’s market position, motivations and goals. This holds equally true at the organizational, departmental and personal levels. Better information means a more finely tuned value argument and increased credibility, both of which mean more positive leverage that will help you close. 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 how many seasoned professionals fail to listen and thus don’t gather valuable information from conversations with potential partners, vendors…

Negotiation Mistakes: Misguided Integrity

August 6, 2014

Negotiating with integrity is central to the Win Wisely™ approach; after all, if we are in search of positive leverage to artfully move the other side closer to our way of thinking, we must have integrity. Integrity gives us the foundation to make value arguments that are believable. When we are perceived as people who constantly play games with the truth and are slippery during discussion of the challenges, our leverage predictably erodes. However, there are situations in which being too forthright needlessly damages your position and erodes your leverage as surely as being untruthful would. Imagine that you are negotiating with a manufacturer whose specialty component is critical to your upcoming product. The week before, you dismissed an alternative provider after lengthy negotiations,…