Blog: The Negotiation Edge

A lot of salespeople go into meetings with potential buyers and spend their time trying to educate them about their products.

But that’s awareness stage stuff. It’s really the job of marketing, and not what your counterpart who’s already agreed to sit down at the table needs to hear. 

Every top-performing sales team is focused on the same thing: getting consistently better results over time. 

If you’ve ever seen practically any movie that involves police officers, you’re familiar with the good cop/bad cop negotiation strategy. During an interrogation, one cop is super nice and the other is a complete jerk.

Though this strategy might lend itself nicely to the silver screen, it’s not something you should ever rely on in the world of high-stakes negotiation. Here’s why:

Whether your sales team is crushing it every month or struggling to reach targets, you can always get better results.

One of the main reasons sales teams don’t reach their full potential is because they bring the wrong tactics to the table.

If your goal is teaching your team to negotiate better deals, here are three lessons you’ll need to get across to achieve that objective.

Many sales negotiations have moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of sitting across the table from someone, sales teams are now hopping between phone calls and Zoom calls to engage the other side and close deals.

Just because your sales negotiation opportunities may have moved from the physical world to the digital world doesn’t mean you need to forget the Black Swan skills and teachings you’ve learned over the years. In fact, our guidelines still apply to virtual sales negotiations.

If you read my previous post, “Why the Traditional Sales Process Is Wrong,” you know that we’re not big fans of the traditional sales process here at The Black Swan Group. Not only does the traditional approach take way too much time, but it also comes with a number of other downsides, such as:

• Wasting your counterpart’s time
• Duplicating work
• Taking longer to get paid
• Spending more time tracking customer interactions
• Preventing your business from reaching its full potential
• Frustrating your team

We advocate for doing everything you can to accelerate your sales process. If you can talk today and get paid tomorrow, well, is the status quo going to stop you from cashing that check?

I struggle with the whole idea of the sales process in general. Granted, I haven’t worked in every industry on the planet. But even though I’ve worked for companies that have had long sales processes, I’ve never been part of a long process myself. 

To me, sales is just two things: the conversation and signing on the dotted line. I’ve always wondered why organizations need all of these different stages of the sales process if we can just get the other side on the phone and sell to them.

Why waste your time when you can just sell?

Mapping out a long sales process guarantees one thing: It’ll take much longer than needed to close. I’ve just never understood why many companies decide to go this route. Why map out an eight-month process for a sale when you can talk today and get the money tomorrow?

Most people head into a negotiation figuring out what they need to compromise on. They do their best to try and determine what little material thing they need to give up in order to get what they want.

That approach is based on compromising your position—selling out in the moment to get some sort of short or long-term gain.

Contrary to what many people think, the fact of the matter is that you don’t have to give up much of anything to get what you want in a negotiation. And what you do have to give up is something intangible, which comes in the form of empathy.

In an ideal world, closing deals would be easy. 

And with the right approach, it sometimes is.

Before sitting down at the table next time, take these five negotiation steps to increase the chances you get the outcomes you’re aiming for.

What’s wrong with “always be closing”? 

To start, it’s pushy. You can’t approach the situation with this mentality and develop a relationship. Always be closing is the same thing as “always be damaging” the relationship—which means you’re sacrificing tomorrow for today, and tomorrow is coming.

At the same time, always be closing has its upside, too. Here’s what’s right and wrong about it and how to integrate these ideas for success.