Episode 174: Negotiate Earlier, Close Bigger: Using Herb Cohen’s Playbook to Sell with Power

In this episode you will learn how Herb Cohen's mastery of negotiation can help us close more deals quicker. Welcome to Sales Process Made Simple. The show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade 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, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. In this episode you will learn how Herb Cohen is a man we can take inspiration from to help us negotiate and close deals more effectively, how that can be done earlier in our sales cycle and some outcomes that we can think about to help grow our businesses quickly. Herb Cohen is a man that I have followed for quite a while. He has been in the negotiation persuasion psychology game for decades and has a book that I have read, loved it was called you'd Can Negotiate anything. His techniques no doubt focus around psychology. Right. Understanding the other side and then strategic thinking. I was going to say out thinking the other side, but it's very much around understanding what the other side's thinking and then how he can use that to get a result from our negotiations. When we look at his career highlights. Herb Cohen's not a man that I would expect everyone on this podcast has necessarily heard of, but he still deals with north of $100 billion. So he has been involved in big Fortune 500 company deals and really helped craft their negotiation strategies. He's also been involved in diplomatic negotiations, really high stakes sales negotiations, and I think in some instances, some really high stake negotiations that had nothing to do with sales. Right. More involving people and peace and transfer of power. So he's a man that I've really admired for a very simple approach that he takes to negotiation and guest persuasion conversations. And that's all around three principles being power, time and information. So power essentially who has the power in a deal, which can often be positional, amongst other things time. Who can be the most patient or who has the least time available when it comes to getting deals done. And then information. Who perhaps has access to the most and most relevant information that can also help get a deal done or can put higher or lower value on certain facets of a deal that allows it also to happen. So without going into detail into that, I'd actually really encourage you to read Herb Cohen's book, you Can Negotiate anything. I really enjoyed it. It's short, sharp, it's punchy, exactly how I like it and really helped me learn some nice extra areas when it comes to negotiation. But I think if we're having a look at what we can be learning from Herb in our roles as sales leaders, for me, it's really about making sure we're understanding what the other side needs. And as early as we possibly can I talk a little bit around, or in fact, I talk a lot around, asking great questions early when it comes to speaking with our customers. But where I haven't spent much time is that when we really truly understand what our customers need, I. E. What's the most important parts of the deal or what are the most important outcomes that they're looking for, this really helps us build some strength in one of Herb's three levers, and that's power. Because when we can understand what's most important to customers, we can build a really compelling proposal. Product or service doesn't matter around exactly what they're looking for. And when we can really know with precision what that customer's looking for, that allows us to do things like charge more, that allows us to do things like close more deals, and that allows us to do things like really deliver great results for our customers, which turns into great case studies, great social proof, return business referrals, word of mouth, everything that goes with really delivering projects to customers successfully. But if I zero in on one of these, I think it's the ability to ask questions early in our customer engagement and then understand exactly what the customer needs gives us the power to be able to design our solution to the exact need that they have. And yes, that is absolutely within the scope of the products and services we do. But if we can nail that, we will be able to charge more. In my experience, plus or minus 10% for most deals is a gray area when it comes to winning and losing. Customers will generally go up and down between 0 and 10% depending on the value they see in products. And where we are absolutely nailing that value proposition to our customers, it affords us to be in the plus range when it comes to price. That is, we don't need to match competitors pricing, and we can charge a little bit more for delivering that great service or those great outcomes. What that means is we can hire better people, we can reinvest into our products, we can bank more profit if that's the case. And I always encourage businesses to bank profit responsibly because you eventually do get caught out when you're greedy and gouge customers. I'm never ever in that camp. However, when we know what the outcomes of our customers are, that allows us to build a really compelling proposition and, and a really strong long term stable cost or pricing structure. So the lesson for me coming out of Herb Cohen is yes, he's a master at negotiation. He has written a great book, you can negotiate anything. He's got three fantastic levers, power, time and information when it comes to negotiating deals. But the key lesson for me, for leaders, is how can you really understand what a customer wants so you can then deliver it through your quote or your proposal and then have a long term and robust pricing strategy that helps your business stay profitable and invest in all the things you need to do to grow. Because if we get that right, if we deliver great outcomes to customers, our business will always exist and will always be able to grow. So walking out of today, the emotional, the thoughts that should be running through your head is to think about if we are really trying to understand what a customer needs. But also, or more importantly we, when we do know what a customer needs, are we actually taking the time to deliver that outcome to them as closely as we possibly can? So we focused a lot on asking the right questions to know what they want. But then are we focusing just as much on delivering that value through our sales proposal and our delivery process? Okay, so we're dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thank you. Very grateful as always to have everyone on board. Please take from today how you can be 1% better at delivering value and great outcomes to your customers. Because if we can do that each and every day, it will make the difference to us growing our sales results. That's it for today. See you next time. Bye for now. Are you struggling to grow your monthly sales numbers? Feel like you've reached a sales ceiling, are involved in every deal, or have no real sales system in place to help you grow? And is that causing a level of worry or stress about how you can get more sales in the future? If that's you, that's exactly why we created the sold Out Sales Teams program to help you get month on month sales growth with less stress. In just the first week, we will lock down your quoting process to grow sales by 25 to 30%. And that's just week one. And for the first three podcast listeners that we speak to this week, we'll offer you a bonus one on one strategy session with me to make sure you can pay off your investment even faster. Which by the way, for most businesses is only one or two extra sales. To book in, click the link in our show notes. It's a direct calendar link so you can instantly confirm your meeting time.