Unlock the Power of Negotiation

And I think everything in sales and everything you do in negotiation is building a long term relationship. Like I've had a great relationship with gehard for over 25 years. I've learned so much from them and I've had a great community with a great relationship with the selling power power community for over 25 years. So I'm really grateful. If you want to connect on LinkedIn, I always look at this, I haven't met you already, I'm excited to meet you and I look at this as a great long term relationship and I think that's how we should always view any sale or negotiation. If you stay through to the end, if we can connect on LinkedIn, that'd be great. If you stay through to the end, I'll give you a link to my book so you can download. I think you'll enjoy it. So only 85 pages, takes about an hour to read.

So just a little bit about us. We serve teams worldwide and we've delivered training in over 100 countries in all different languages, whether it's Mandarin, Cantonese, you name any European language, the us, Africa. And what that has given us is given us a global perspective on negotiation and the best sales forces and some of the challenges. And we're able to bring that experience of what the best of the best do to you. So the benefit to you is you don't have to travel around the world. We've done that and we've curated and we try always bring the best to you.

Now, negotiation is one of the most powerful skills you can have as a salesperson. There's a whole bunch of skills that you need, but ultimately your ultimate destiny is going to be determined by your negotiation. It's going to determine whether you win or lose a deal. And if you win it, is it going to be profitable? And if you win it, and if it's going to be profitable, how does that relationship start? Does it start on a high note or does it start on a sour? A sour note. So it's really an important skill that you negotiate well.

The issue is that negotiation is a scary word. It makes people feel uncomfortable when you think about it. What word, what words come to mind when you hear about negotiation? Stress, anxiety, fear of losing the deal. I think if John Asher, our previous speaker, had a, a picture, your fear neurons would be lighting up. And that's a paradox. It's a really powerful tool, but we're also scared of it. And that's why it's often least understood and least trained skill. And it's interesting we'll go and speak to sales organizations and say, when was the last time you did sales training? And most people have been through tons of sales training and we did last year, we did the year before. When was the last time you did negotiation? And we'll go, oh, five years ago, seven years ago, 10 years ago. So there's a big gap there because it's not as understood and it's not as propagated. But the good news for you is it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be scary. In fact, negotiation is a learnable skill and process. It's a precise process, in fact, and you can train it, coach it, and implement it quickly and easily. So all that fear that you might have gets easily dissipated when you have a really simple process you can follow.

So where does negotiation begin?

Right.

Typically, if you look at our typical sales process, we have a first call, discovery needs analysis, proposed solution your may vary, but all of them will have a general thing. And then we go negotiate and close. And typically that's where we start thinking about negotiation. And as Garrett alluded to, where does negotiation begin? It begins at your very first call. And in fact it often happens before your very first call. It may be the last interaction they have with your company. Let's say a prospect moves from company to company B and a company B, they want to use your product and he knew that Company A was getting 50 discount. He's already got that negotiation in his mind. So you have to be prepared with negotiation at the very first call.

And a question for the group and just put it into the chat box. Chat box. Is every conversation a negotiation? Let's throw that into the chat box. Just a simple yes or no.

Gearhard, what are your thoughts? Is every conversation a negotiation?

Ron? I think that.

Everything is negotiable and that every conversation is creates an atmosphere of influence and either you are getting influenced by the other person or you influence the other person.

Love it. Absolutely. So every conversation is a negotiation. And not only do I and Gerhardt agree that, even ChatGPT agrees with that. Right. Every conversation is negotiation. Yes. Especially in sales. Right. You're either creating leverage or you're giving it away. So your sales process is a series of negotiations. Each meeting is a negotiation. And as you move down the line, there's more and more negotiations. So if you really think about it, a complex sale might have eight meetings, 10 meetings, nine meetings, four meetings, three meetings might be meeting one, two, three, four, five people. You're going through a Series of negotiations. And the interesting thing is a lot of our tenant times, our team is not prepared. Right. We, we taught them how to sell, but we haven't taught them how to negotiate. Negotiate and close. So if your whips, if your reps wait until the end, you've already lost. It means you may have already lost the deal. People may ghost you, you may get to the end and they may, you may lose it. And even if you win it, you're gonna have to discount deeply to get it. And the other thing is, once you discount, you erode your credibility. So think of your company, right? You put all this effort into being a really top notch company, a great organization, all your processes are buttoned down, you have great software or whatever the product you're selling. You go to the customer, hey, here's the price that I thought you'd be foolish enough to accept. No, no, no, no, wait. We're going to take 20% off. What does that say about your credibility? What does it say about your company? It's completely inconsistent. So if you're waiting until the end, you've lost. Even if you win the deal, you, you've lost.

And you may not get there at all. Because along the way, each step is a negotiation and you can start losing early on and they'll never return your call.

The scary and interesting stat is that less than 10% of companies have a negotiation process. So think about it. Most companies we work with have some kind of sales process, whether it's loose, defined or informal. But less than 10% have a negotiation process. And if you're going through a negotiation process in each one of your sales, you're geometrically hurting your chance of success.

So the question is, are we setting our reps up to, to fail if they don't have no. Have negotiation skills? Unequivocally, yes.

And here are some symptoms of poor negotiation skills. Here's how they manifest themselves. Reps race to the bottom on price. You get too much discounting or a high discount rate. You get a low average selling price. Inconsistent negotiation promise across the team. Some reps will sell the same product for 0% discount, while other people need a 40% discount. Right? You can see that when you actually see a scatter plot of discounts. It is one of the widest scatter plots you can ever see. Winnable deals are lost deals you should win or lost. And deals that do come in come in less than asking price. You get low close rates and deals slip past their forecast date resulting in miss their inexperienced forecasts. You get longer sales cycle and some forecasted deals in fact never close. Now if you just look at these, these are sort of the top 10 noticeable things. You can pull these things out of a CRM typically. Add these top 10, how many does your team experience? If you put in the chat box, add these top 10, how many of you personally witnessed from your sales team?

Okay. Any responses on the screen? I didn't see any.

Repeat the question.

Of these 10, how many have people witnessed.

On their sales team?

Well, according to the audience, pretty much everybody.

Okay, so you feel the pain, right? This is the exact, this is the outcome of poor sales skills. And I always like. But wait, there's more. There are other things. There's psychological and process issues. There's a fear of losing. Right. People are scared. Right. Instead of being happy and confident, you have salespeople who are not confident. They're scared. They're reactive instead of proactive. They get emotional versus plan. They're panicked, they lose control of the process. The buyer starts owning the process. You can get surprised late in the process. Oh, we got a new person. We need to get on board. They'll give without getting. Oh, I'll do that. Yes. Can we close by Friday? Yeah, I'll give you whatever you want. They don't have the backbone to have a walkaway price and sell on the value that they created. And then what you see is management flying in last minute trying to salvage late stage deals. And the team generally has lack of confidence. So it really affects you both on the, the financial metrics and then on the emotional process metrics as well.

So the question to the team out there is, does your team have a well defined negotiation process? What percentage of people on the call have a well defined negotiation process?

And then if you can chat, chat in the type box, put in the chat box. Do you think it would be a good idea to have one?

I'll give you a minute for everyone to answer that question. Just a simple yes or no. Do you think it'd be a good idea to have a negotiation process?

Absolutely. 100% yes. Yes.

Love it. Absolutely. And to me, it's really one of the most fundamental skills and it's the most missing skills, which is the paradox. Right. It's the most important and it's the most missing. So once you do that, once you fix that, there's a lot of good that can happen. And just think, what if? Just allow yourself to, to fantasize. What if. Yeah, an easy to implement negotiation process, one they can implement in one to four hours just for an example. And it was an easy use, step by step process. And I always differential process from a framework. So think about baking a cake, right? It's like buy the ingredients, right? Go to the store, buy the ingredients, mix them up, put them in a pan, put them in the oven. So there's a process. Bake for 45 degrees, you know, 45 minutes at 450 degrees, right? Let cool for 20 minutes. You have to follow a step by step process, right? If you do it out of order, if you might have the steps, but if you do matter order, you won't get a cake. If you buy the ingredients but you don't mix them and you put them in the oven and you don't preheat the oven, you're not going to get a good outcome. So you're looking for an easy step by step process that your team can implement.

And then you want something specifically designed for B2B sales. And this is actually kind of interesting. Negotiation is a big word. It's like saying, hey, I'm good at math. Well, what does that actually mean? Are you good at addition, subtraction, multiplication, calculus, differential equations? There are different types of math. One type of math is conflict resolution. One type of negotiation is conflict resolution. How do you two parties at work up to peace where it has a labor union negotiate with a corporation. And the key thing there is both parties have to deal with each to deal with each other. And if you don't come to a conclusion, bad stuff's going to happen. So the labor union go on strike or the company can shut down the factory, or in the case of a war, ongoing hostility, bad stuff's going to happen. Well, that's a very different negotiation than a business to business sales negotiation where you want to win the deal, command a price premium and create a great long term customer, right? And the customer always has the option of doing nothing, being status quo or going to one of your competitors. And you can't inflict pain and misery. In the case of a hostage negotiation, if they want to get out alive, they have to deal with you. In a business to business sales negotiation, they can never deal with you and suffer no adverse consequences. So in fact, while a business business sale may not be as complex as a hostage negotiation, it's very different and in fact harder. And another type of negotiation is a spot transactional negotiation. So how do I beat a street vendor at 15 bucks? There's no sales process up front and there's no legacy on the back end. So a Lot of times people try and use those other two negotiation paradigms and they fail miserably. But in fact if you learn a business to business sales negotiation where the customer doesn't have to work with you, they go to one they can go to with one of your competitors who looks just like you. It's a much more complex. So always look for a negotiation process that's specifically time for business to business.

How would that improve your team's results?

You can reduce discounting, increase average selling price, improve forecasting accuracy, better forecast predictability. You prevent deals from slipping, reduce senior management teams involved. The senior management loves that. And you build better customer relationships. You become proactive and confident in negotiation. Look forward to it. Because negotiation is the ultimate buying signal versus reactive. You create confidence, you give our reps confidence and replaces fear. And you get more hit reps hitting quota. So you get the whole mother load. So your opportunity is by putting negotiation in practice place. You could be the hero or shiro. Right? If you look at what we do in sales training, sales analytical and sales leadership, the fickle finger of blame often falls away. This is the simplest, easiest thing that you can do with the whole portfolio to make a tremendous increase in sales and see immediate results.

So there's only two things you need to negotiate well. Very simple. The first is you need a really strong sales process. A strong sales process creates the potential to negotiate well. If you combine that with a strong negotiation plan, you'll capitalize on that potential. If you have a weak or non existent plan, you'll squander that potential. But there's no amount of negotiation proudness that'll make up for a poor sales effort. A strong sales effort is absolutely needed to is essential to negotiate well. And what I always like doing is actually teaching negotiation first because it's classic begin in mind. So when you know what you need to negotiate well, you start selling better in the beginning. So it really reinforces the trend. Why do I have to be the buyer's number one choice? How do I have to have value? Why do I have to do good discovery? What I have to have understand the customer's needs in their business. And here's our really simple seven step process is precise formula step by step. The first is you have to be the buyer's number one choice. If you're not the buyer's number one choice, they're really negotiating with you to beat down the price of the real winner, your competition. And we talk about the companies don't buy price, they buy risk. And if in Your sales process, you can show your least risky solution. You've earned the right to command a price premium. The second is you have to know the value create. If you don't know the value create, you're going to be left to defend price, which is going to put you in a negative or reactionary negotiation position. The third is to anticipate getting squeezed. Look forward to it in a negotiation. That's the ultimate buying cycle. They're going to squeeze you. It's not personal, it's just business. You have to be able to resist the price squeezes by anticipating them and knowing and be looking, looking forward to it. Right. And reflect value back to the customer. And in fact, I want you to be disappointed if they don't squeeze you. It was like, wow, I came to this negotiation being ultra prepared to resist squeezes. They only squeezed me twice. Awesome. You want to be proactive on the budget and decision making process. Step five is you want to expand the pilot trade off. So what are things we can do to increase the value to that customer, continue to lower the risk. That isn't a dollar for dollar trade off. And I'd rather close by step five than step six, which is giving discounts. And how many people have ever noticed that reps give without getting all the time? If you are getting a good discount, get something in return, whether it's a long term commitment, more users, faster rollout. And step seven is know your walkway price. And if you go through this process, if you've gone through steps one through six, should rarely if ever get to step seven. Just out of curiosity, of these seven laws, how many you think the average sales rep uses if people want to type in the chat box?

So out of these seven steps, how many you think your average sales team uses?

3.

2.

That turns out the average sales team uses 1.5.

Wow.

Yep. So just by adding a step or two, you're guaranteed success. You can't screw this up. It's great. It's awesome. So that's what we find worldwide, globally, regardless of the language, regardless of the product you're selling. Here's a great example. Here's Jeff Knapp. Love Jeff. Very experienced enterprise sales guy, great salesperson. But he didn't have the negotiation skills. The first negotiation he entered into, he tripled revenues, which literally meant hundreds of million dollars. He closed a $600 million deal. He brought a client up from 200 million to 600. And he attributed all to our training. Just sort of as an example. And you can see great results. I mean we're monumental, like doubling asp. We just work with a, a small SAS company. We doubled their ASP overnight and it's again because each, each sales call is a negotiation. So the, the wins and the effects stack up on each other. Another company immediate one month after trading 80, 80% increase in average selling price over the course of the year. They 5x the average selling price. Just for an example. You'll see reductions in discounting, you'll see increases in close rate. The other really interesting thing is people think we're just going to reduce discounting, which we absolutely do do. The better effect is you increase close rates because it's classic beginning of the month, end with begin with the end in mind. So when you know what you need to do to do to negotiate well, you start selling better in the beginning. So the successes that you can get, they stack up on each other because your sales process is a negotiation process and we're not equipping our team with the right tools to negotiate well.

So if you're looking for some negotiation, here's the three things you need to really look for. Make sure it's easy to implement. Just ours happens. You can implement ours in one to four hours. Typically you want an exact step by step process. Not a framework, not a kind of bat consequence of no agreement complicated thing. Most time our quick sheet takes about 15 minutes to fill out the first time, about 10, 15 minutes after that and the whole team can rally around it. You want a step by step process and you want it to be designed for B2B sales and that'll make you the Shero hero. And when you look at the overall sales enablement landscape and training landscape, there's a million things you can do. There's absolutely million things you can do. They take time, change management. This is the simplest, easiest thing that you can implement. They'll have an immediate impact on sales.

You can download a complimentary copy of our book. If you want to speak to me, you can book a meeting and I'll throw it open to qa. For anybody who's interested in QA at Gerhardt.

This was awesome because people said that was too quick. Where can I get these steps? Andrea says I love those steps too. And Bob says the steps are in his book Closing time. And I just dropped a link to your audiobook. What I like to do is this is my personal habit to learning, which is I get the reading book and the audiobook and I listen to the audiobook while I watch the tribe and it's more immersive geard.

You never cease to amaze me. I, I, I always walk out of the conversation smarter than it would have been before. So I love that. Thank you for giving me that beautiful idea.

Ron, I want to thank you for an outstanding and action focused session. And I think you reminded us that negotiation is not something that happens at the end of a deal. It is a strategic discipline. It begins with the very first interaction, as you said earlier, and shapes the entire sales process. And I'm reminded that if the first button of a shirt is wrong, all the other buttons are wrong. So you want to make sure that you do the right things in the beginning. And Ronnie, you made it clear that a negotiation is not about giving discounts. It's about preparation, it's about clarity, and it's about aligning the value with meaningful business outcomes. So I can't thank you enough for expanding our understanding of negotiation and showing how sales people can close stronger, create more profitable deals without those unnecessary profit robbing concessions. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you and your team for the opportunity. And I want to thank everyone who tuned in and you have a wonderful team. And Gerhard, you know I love you and I learned from you.

You good have been a good friend. And thanks, Ron.

Thank you, Gerhard. And.