Negotiation Skills for Sales Professionals

What clinches a successful sale? Smooth talk, a warm smile, and a firm handshake might make a good first impression, but clever businesspeople are more concerned with the value you have to offer them. Making a mutually beneficial deal requires careful preparation before you start the negotiation process. Potential customers are more likely to buy from suppliers who understand their needs and have all requisite information at their fingertips. A first step in negotiating successfully is understanding the difference between selling and negotiating. A sale is simply a transaction between seller and buyer, and is the result of closing a deal. Negotiation, however, involves defining the terms of the deal - who gets what in exchange for what. A good negotiator will be able to work out the best possible deal with any given client and product. Successful sales negotiations involve identifying and building on areas of agreement and they can help you build lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with customers. In this book, you'll learn why it's important to use a systematic sales negotiation process, when it's relevant to use this process, and what the stages in the process are. You'll also learn more about the first stage in the process, which is preparing properly before negotiation begins. An important activity in the preparation stage is to determine objectives for a negotiation - including yours and those of your customer. Once you've done this, you can prepare the concessions you're willing to make in the book of negotiating. This involves weighing what you can afford to offer the other party against what you hope to get. In this book, you'll learn more about each of these activities and how to approach them. Ultimately, this book will equip you to complete the first steps in making effective, long-lasting, and profitable sales agreements with your customers. Consider a sales manager at a small graphic design company who's competing for projects with other design companies in the same city. Whenever he meets with a potential client, he names a higher price than his competitors and refuses to bargain. Needless to say, he fails to attract new clients and the design company goes out of business. The sales manager should have realized that successful sales negotiations are about give and take - or what's called the careful exchange of value. By nature, a sales negotiation involves two parties with different goals trying to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. With good negotiation skills, you'll be able to facilitate this process and ensure you and the other party reach agreement. You'll also be able to influence the proceedings so that the outcome is more favorable to you than to your negotiation partner. The four stages of the sales negotiation process are preparation, presentation, value exchange, and closing. This book focuses on value exchange. It covers the ways you can get the best possible deal for yourself because you'll know more about the what, when, and how of value exchange. In this book, you'll learn strategies to ensure a desirable outcome from a value exchange and what concessions to offer to convince the other party to agree to the deal. You'll also learn when to offer concessions. Poor timing can negatively affect the outcome of a negotiation. By learning how to best offer concessions, you'll be in a better position to negotiate the best possible deal and achieve your sales objectives.