Negotiation has changed a lot over the last few years. Once upon a time, negotiation techniques were the domain of salespeople and it was they who most often benefited from negotiation workshops and training. Nowadays, their advantage is no longer so pronounced, and this is because buyers have also attached more importance to negotiating. Not only do they have increasingly sophisticated tools to analyse market trends and company performance, but they are also improving their own negotiation skills.
Although the bar has been set high for negotiators, they still have many opportunities to gain a negotiating advantage. So what should they be particularly mindful of in their discussions with buyers?
Overall offer value as a starting point
Before entering into negotiation talks with buyers, it is worth bearing in mind their overriding objective. And that is, first and foremost, to break down the offer being made by the negotiator. Why do they do this? By using this strategy, they are able to bring every element of the offer down to a level of comparability and expand the negotiating field, thereby creating better conditions for themselves to negotiate the overall contract.
What can a negotiator do in the face of such tactics? The most important thing to do here will be to focus on the totality of the offer and to put all its parts together into one inseparable and interdependent whole. Highlighting the benefits, due to the comprehensiveness of the service, resulting from the combination of the individual components can be crucial and will make our offer unique.
Support among decision-makers
It is extremely common to experience situations where the consent of decision-makers is required to accept the terms and conditions we offer. Buyers are often only their representatives, which allows them to use this circumstance to their own advantage. Indeed, the acceptance of the decision-makers is the final approval of the arrangements. They thus sustain the apparent unavailability of decision-makers in the the process of negotiating the conditions to maintain control of the discussions.
However, in order to avoid obstacles arising from the need for the decision-maker to endorse the findings, it is worthwhile to secure their position as early as possible, securing the support of the buyer's stakeholder/stakeholders. The best strategy may even be to invite the decision-maker to a negotiation meeting, which will further facilitate the presentation of the terms offered by the negotiator in a face-to-face manner and possibly allay the concerns of the person influencing the final decision.
Readiness to „attack” and to „attack”
Merchants, through the use of negotiation workshops and business training, are constantly improving their negotiating skills and use similar techniques to those used by skilled negotiators. One of these is to conduct thorough research before entering into negotiation talks. This discernment involves, among other things, a detailed study of the environment of potential bidders and obtaining as much information as possible about their situation. This allows them to know about possible weaknesses of the supplier, including potential threats to deadlines or the quality of service delivery or the delivery of parts for production.
„Attack” in this sense is naturally strictly figurative, although the word has been used deliberately. For the use of the weaknesses argument should remain a last resort and should not be abused, especially as the practice is highly controversial.
It is therefore clear that it is not only useful to be prepared for the possible need to counter-argue, but also to have information about the buyer's company in hand that we can use should the need arise. Tools such as the well-known SWOT, Porter's 5 Forces or the Customer Categorisation to better understand the balance of power are helpful in this regard.
Would you like to learn negotiate effectively? Or do you want to improve your qualifications and reach the level of negotiation expert? Take a look at our current business training offer.
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