Since objections are a natural part of the B2B sales process, it is essential that sales professionals acquire good negotiation skills to close more deals on time that are favourable to both themselves and clients.
To achieve such a win-win position when negotiating it is essential that:
- You sell your own position in the context of what drives your client
- You regard the negotiation of commercial terms as a key element of the sales process and not simply as an afterthought.
Negotiating from the Left
When delivering my sales training programmes, I like to teach people a simple five-stage methodology called ‘Negotiating from the Left’. This strategy has been proven to deliver significant improvements to the closure of deals.
The first three stages of this model represent the client’s world (on the left) while the final two stages represent your own position (on the right), as follows:
1. Your opponent’s drivers for change.
The first stage involves agreeing with the client about the pressures they face to deliver a solution. Here it really helps if these are external pressures outside of the buying organisation’s control. This is a crucial aspect of leading the sales process and is critical to improving your negotiation skills. If you’re selling a compliance solution to enable your client to respond to a new piece of legislation, for instance, you need to convince and agree with them that the legislation will happen and that it must be responded to.
2. The implications and the cost of failing to respond.
The second stage is to consider the implications and internal pain-points that these external pressures will result in. You need to discuss the implications (i.e. costs) of failing to respond to the pressures for change to create urgency on the buyer’s behalf. With a forthcoming change to compliance legislation, for example, failure to respond could have huge implications for your opposite number. You should agree on what the implications of failure to comply with the legislation will be (in terms of cost) before setting out your offer and your own commercial position.
3. Their desire and need for improvement.
The third stage represents the desires and needs of the client for improvement (and the priorities of these desires and needs). This must be in the context of the external pressures they are experiencing. If a new piece of legislation is threatening to make your client in the negotiation non-compliant, you need to agree not only on the implications of failure to respond, but also the desired benefits of the solution which you are proposing.
4. Added value.
Taking the above example further, if you have unique added value and a solution that can make your customer compliant, you can estimate the value of your solution to the customer and the pressure on them to select, buy and implement the solution in time for the new legislation becoming active. This represents the fourth stage of ‘Negotiating from the Left’. Always know your value and always know the pressure on the client to act and the pain of not responding to that pressure in good time.
5. Your desired outcome or position.
The final stage involves pioneering your own desired outcome or position. If you introduce your own position earlier or you open the discussion by setting out your own demands, it is highly possible that you will completely negate all the sales efforts that have gone beforehand and the whole negotiation process may simply become a head-butting exercise. The conversation is likely to quickly descend into a “what you want” versus “what they want” situation and might become a battle of egos. This will not lead to a win-win position.
Remember, to significantly increase your chances of negotiating a beneficial deal, you have to present your case from the perspective of the other person (i.e. the client’s world) and ‘Negotiate from the Left’. It really does work.
