Negotiating Like A Pro

Do customers in your industry pay the asking price? Or do they routinely ask for a lower price, better terms, extra merchandise, rebates, slotting fees, or extended service? If you sell business-to-business, you’ve probably never had a customer agree to pay your asking price on the first pass. It’s becoming more common in retail sales, too. What your customers are doing, of course, is practicing an art as old as commerce itself. They’re negotiating.

Negotiation is that stage of the selling process that occurs after the commitment to buy is made but before the sale is actually closed. It’s when the buyer and seller come to terms on the conditions under which the product or service is provided.

Sounds imposing, doesn’t it? And it can be a complicated undertaking, which is why I suggest you approach negotiations as carefully as James Cameron approached the production of Avatar. You need to coordinate all the various components of the negotiation if you are going to produce a successfully orchestrated sale.

Negotiation is a matter of choices by both parties. One party chooses whether or not to offer something and the other one chooses whether or not to accept it. As you’ll see, it’s not always the seller who does the offering, nor is it always the buyer who does the accepting or rejecting. Nor is price the only item subject to negotiation.

When do you negotiate? If you’re a creative seller, you only negotiate the terms of your proposal after the prospect has made the commitment to buy the idea you are selling. If the prospect doesn’t like the idea, no amount of negotiation of the price or any of the other terms will make the sale happen. But once that commitment is made, you can assume that you will negotiate the sale in one way or another.

The price to value ratio is at the heart of every negotiation. Both the buyer and the seller negotiate both sides of that equation, giving gains on one side in return for gains on the other. When the needs of both the buyer and seller are met, the sale occurs.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Effective Team Sales Presentations

Each team, even if it consists of only two members, should have a leader. That’s usually the senior person on the team and will be the person the prospect will tend to address with questions. It doesn’t have to be, but it usually happens that way. The leader will also generally be the one to open the presentation and ask the closing question. If there is any question about who’s going to be the leader on your team, settle it before you go into the presentation.

But don’t let the leader look like the Grand Poobah attended by his retinue. If the leader delegates all the menial tasks like handing out materials to the lowly lackeys on the team, the prospect is liable to sense a power display in progress, and react negatively. Eliminate this problem before it arises and make sure the leader is perceived as a member of the team, not its monarch.

On the other end of the scale, also make sure that every member of the team actively participates in the presentation. Each person should have a speaking role of some sort, preferably related to their role in the seller’s plan to serve the prospect’s needs. You don’t want the prospect wondering why that guy in the corner isn’t saying anything while you’re trying to make the points in your presentation. The Metropolitan Opera may need spear-carriers, but your sales team doesn’t.

In order to keep your team call focused on results, make sure everyone on the team understands these points about the upcoming call:

What are we trying to do?
If this call is successful, what will happen?
Who are the key players?
What happened on the last call?
What are we going to ask them to do?
Why should they do it?

The choir always sounds better when they’re all singing the same song.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Preparing The Team For Your Sales Presentation

Pre-call preparation for the team presentation is essential. You should each know what your respective roles are going to be on the call before you begin the presentation. Even if the presentation is one you’ve done together many times, rehearse it before you go into the meeting. This means everyone on the team, including your company’s CEO. And the practice must be a full dress rehearsal complete with the actual props you’re going to be using.

One of my most embarrassing moments occurred during a team presentation. It happened because we had not rehearsed with the actual materials we were going to use. There were four of us making a pitch that we had done many times together. Our presentations usually involved the top decision makers and were quite lengthy and detailed. We typically used a lot of boilerplate material, but the key points were always customized for the prospect we were pitching.

The climax of the pitch came when I would present our revenue projections for the prospect. I typically jumped into that page like a preacher at a revival, giving it everything I had. On this occasion, though, when I turned the page I saw the headings of the columns of figures carried not this prospect’s name but the name of the company we had pitched the week before. The figures were correct, but they looked like they belonged to another company.
We all saw the simple little word processing mistake at the same time and everyone in the room was embarrassed, including the prospect. But the damage had been done. This little mistake completely undermined the “personal attention to each client” benefit that was our primary selling point. It cost us a $6 million client. The material had been proofread by three people, including me. But we hadn’t used the actual materials in our rehearsal the night before. I’ll always believe that we would have caught the mistake if we had followed that simple little rule.

In addition to the pitch itself, you should also rehearse the answers to particular questions and objections that you expect to crop up. It’s important to know which person on the team is going to answer which question so that there’s no fumbling when it arises. If the prospect asks you about delivery dates, for example, you don’t want a long awkward pause followed by three people giving three different answers all at once. You also don’t want your team leader to “hand off” a question to someone who’s not expecting it.

You also need to organize your visual aids under the management of one member of the team. We’ve all seen blooper video where three outfielders collide under the same fly ball in short center field. You don’t want that to happen to you in front of a room full of prospects, so make sure each piece of equipment and each piece of hand-out material is one person’s responsibility. Your hand-outs, by the way, should be managed the same way they are in a group presentation—the one team member responsible for them passes them out with the order and flow you want.

Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.

Playing Golf The John Kennedy Way

At last, a golf instruction book that tells you how to think about the game, not just swing a club! It's Tales From The Lesson Tee by John Kennedy, Director of Golf at Westchester Country Club. Kennedy writes in the spirit of the famous quotation from Bobby Jones, "Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course, the space between your ears." His book is a compendium of stories, suggestions, and well-thought-out examples that prove how we mentally approach the game of golf is just as important--if not more so--than the physical moves we use to play it.

Kennedy's long, rich experience in golf shows on every page. He talks about the lessons he learned teaching the game to everyone from rank beginners to tour pros during his more than 20 years at Westchester, a PGA Tour stop for decades and one of the largest private clubs in the country. The PGA of America gave Kennedy the 2010 Horton Smith Award, honoring him as the nation's leading educator in his profession. When he makes suggestions about how to think about your game, you should listen.

Reading the book is like having a long, easy conversation with Kennedy. He doesn't just tell you to practice more, for example, he explains how to get the most from your time on the range, then mixes in a few stories of players who've done it both the right way and the wrong way--often to humorous effect. There are sections on how (and why) to set reasonable goals for yourself, how to find and work with an instructor that's right for you, how to maintain your mental equilibrium before, during, and after a round, and much more.

It is absolutely refreshing to read a golf instruction book that never once promises to help you hit it longer, higher, or straighter. The subtitle tells it all: "How To Know Your Game, Know Yourself, And Play Better Without Changing Your Swing."

In addition to writing about golf, Dave Donelson distills the experiences of hundreds of entrepreneurs into practical advice for small business owners and managers in the Dynamic Manager's Guides, a series of how-to books about marketing and advertising, sales techniques, motivating personnel, financial management, and business strategy.