E225: CRITICAL Negotiation Power Moves that Will Help you Sign Deals and Land Customers (And Stop You Losing Sales!): Sales, Leadership, Trade

I used to think that negotiation was a really difficult skill to master. Thankfully, after 25 or almost 25 years of selling, it turns out it's much easier than I thought.

Welcome to Sales Growth Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 figure trade, construction and industry sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, and over the last 15 years I've helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses, and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.

Let's get started. When I heard the word negotiation, up until quite recently, so towards my late 30s, even into my early 40s, it tended to be a word that I found to be a little bit taboo with me personally, how I worked. And I absolutely can share this from sales leaders that I've worked with where they feel like it's constantly on their to-do list. I'd love to get better at my negotiation skills. I'd love to improve how I negotiate, right? Over the next 12 months, I really want to see if I can become a better person at negotiating to get deals done. I hear it all the time. In fact, it's rare that I meet a leader who doesn't want to improve their negotiation skills. And I absolutely was that same type of leader across, you can say, the majority of my sales year to date, the almost 25 years. I'd say I was sitting in that camp for about 20 years. What I realized along the journey, and it came for me after I read a book by Herb Cohen, which is called You Can Negotiate Anything. Anything. It's quite a short book. It's easy to read, very, very easy to find. And for me, it made a huge difference around recognizing that negotiation wasn't always about being hard, about being the one at the other side of the table that would flex the least, or that would be strongest in their conviction, or the sneakiest in terms of getting deals done. And that for me came about 5 years ago, and I think it was a real turning point around how I handle negotiation, and certainly has resulted in many negotiations that I conduct now and the negotiations that I have even with my trade leaders when I'm negotiating and we're negotiating between each other. It's resulted in a framework that allows me to far more confidently approach negotiations without the fear that I'm going to lose the deal. And for me, that's really what drove me to being quite nervous about negotiation, was that if I got it wrong, I'd lose the deal, rather than thinking that if I got it wrong, I maybe wouldn't get the best deal possible. And that's the big change for me in this framework, is that I now approach negotiation with a confidence that I will always get the deals done. The question is more about where we land rather than winning or losing the deal. So the 3 key areas that Herb talks about, and, and look, I'm going to talk through these in very much a trade landscaper. They certainly may not hit the purest approach that is in Herb's book. However, I think these are tailored really nicely to a practical business sense in the trade industry. So 3 levers: time, power, and knowledge. They're the 3 levers that we'll quickly skim through now. First one being time. So time is one of those pieces where when we talk about great athletes, great footballers, great tennis players, and we've all heard the saying that they make time look still, or they make time stop, because they just appear to have so much time on the court, on the ground, in navigating what they need to do to hit the ball, to kick the ball, to score a goal, whatever it may be. Time in a negotiation sense, it's very much one that The parties that have the most time or feel like they have the most time tend to be the ones that get the best results, and they get those results because they're not rushing the deals. So where I see time being really impactful in the trade landscape for negotiations is a couple of areas. Number one is patience. So being patient to work with customers, to ask what's most important, to work through exactly what they're going to need and design a solution for them takes a little bit more time up front front, but at the back end results in deals closing more quickly and far higher close rates. And what I mean here is that if an average deal for a trade business is 3 hours by the time being you drive there, by the time being you spend time with a customer, you quote, you follow up, right? And you go through all those areas and you're closing 1 in 4 deals, right? Then you're averaging 12 hours per deal. So 3 hours to get for each deal, you're closing 1 in 4, gives you 12 hours per sales week. If for those deals we can spend an extra 20 minutes on site, so we go from 3 hours— in fact, let's round it out, let's go out to 3.5 hours, an extra 30 minutes on site. Now process ends up being 3 hours 30 minutes rather than 3 hours, but our close rates go from 1 in 4 to 1 in 3, right? Then 3 times 3.5 hours is 10.5 hours. So for every deal that was taking us 12 hours, even though we're spending more time up front, we're actually down to 10.5 hours to get the deal done. Right, so an hour and a half saving or just over 10%. And that's very much the approach around patience and making sure that we're spending the time to understand our customers. But the second area around time that's really important is that the more we can educate our customers around who we are, what we do, what's important, and then lining it up with what they need, then the time at their end starts to speed up. Their level of comfort with us starts to move ahead quickly, and the time that we need to spend with them decreases certainly at the back end because they've got some confidence in what we're doing. So when we talk about negotiations for trade businesses, my, my best advice around this is to try and avoid having to have a negotiation, but you use the principles from a book like Hurd's across all of your sales dealings. And for me, I very rarely have negotiations on price in my business because I'm able to work through these levers really, really effectively during my sales process. Which means I've actually stepped through those difficult negotiating points before we even get there. So time being number one, slow down, spend the time with the customer. As importantly, educate them, get them really comfortable with you so that they feel less of a need to negotiate on price and more of a need that, that it's you that they want and need to do their job. And that's where we roll into power. So time, patience, power is all around expertise. So where we are pairing both slowing down and educating customers around What's important and understanding what they need, but then also combining that with a level of expertise, which is the power lever in Herb's book, right? Showing that we are absolutely on top of our game, showing that we have significant experience in what we're doing, being able to articulate exactly what they need and how we will deliver it. That's power. And that last sentence is without doubt the most important. Power comes from leveraging your expertise against what the customer wants or needs. It's not about just leveraging your expertise. Because if it's not related, if you are an amazing electrician at commercial high-rises and you start leveraging how many big high-rise buildings you have done when you're talking to a residential customer, well, that's not necessarily going to land with the customer. Because certainly, and I've seen this firsthand, is that the customer will say, oh, hang on, our job's too small for you, or you're set up for big jobs, you're going to be expensive. Or, wow, you have so much experience, why would you want to work with me? Whereas instead, leveraging how much experience you have with residential jobs, particularly and specifically what you're doing in that house, that's where power comes from. So time's all about patience, power is all about expertise. And by aligning that expertise with exactly what the customer wants, we're creating a situation where the customer feels like they need your services. And the more a customer feels like they need your services, the more negotiating power you have, and the less questions that come back as you work through that deal around price. Third one is knowledge. So knowledge is different to expertise because expertise is all about aligning your experience to what the customer needs and wants. Knowledge is about helping the customer understand. When you can share your knowledge, and if we stay with that residential, um, electrical example, where you can share your knowledge not just to say, hey, we've rolled out 1,000 residential new builds, right, when we're talking about a house new build. But when we start to share that knowledge, it says, okay, you're looking for 4 power points in this room. Why? What's so important? Because 4 power points in 4 corners, that's going to cost you a bit of money. And the customer comes back with, look, we've got a lot of devices, a lot of USB-powered devices that are all around the house, and we want to make sure we've got enough plugs for them, right? And a smart electrician can say, hey, you know, why don't we put 2 lots of 2 GPOs in 2 corners of the room rather than in 4? We'll save you a whole lot of money in your electrical wiring. Or even better is to say, let's put USB ports into those power points. Right? And you can keep rolling, you can keep rolling into smart PowerPoints, right? And I know there's a whole long list of things we can do around PowerPoints on their own. But when we're building up the knowledge of our customers to help them feel like they're saving money or they're making great decisions or it's driving value into their, in this example, residential build, right? We're ticking off the knowledge box. And again, for us, we're not having to negotiate on price because that's generally what we're talking about, negotiating on commercial terms, because we are seen as someone that the customer trusts, right? Knowledge, compared with someone that the customer feels they need. That's the expertise or the power, right? Compared with a customer who feels we've listened to and answered all of their questions, right? And taken them along the journey, which is time or patience. So that is that broad framework that I loved out of Herb Cohen's book when I read it about 5 years ago. Time, power, and knowledge. 3 levers that unfortunately took me 20-odd years to realize were seriously impactful when it comes to negotiations and avoiding really heavy price negotiations. However, they're also lessons that I really wanted to share because I think they can make a huge difference, particularly to trade leaders that feel like they're spending just so much time quoting sales and not winning enough deals, right? If you're one of those people, this framework, this Herb Cohen's Negotiating Time, Power and Knowledge, absolutely can help you win more of those deals because the reality is if you don't change something now, you're going to continue to get these same really stressful results over and over again, which is going to leave you working those long hours and not getting the money in your bank to show for it. So to help with that, in addition to this great episode, I've got a free quoting quiz that will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to quickly grow your sales, generally by 20 to 25%, right? We'll find one thing when you click on the free quiz link that's in the show notes. You can get started now. It'll take you less than a minute. Okay, that's it for today. Please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day. It will make all the difference. Bye for now.