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Good read – Strategic Negotiation by Brian Dietmeyer

28 Aug

I’ve recently re-read a good business book on negotiations, “Strategic Negotiation” by Brian Dietmeyer. Instead of the old win-lose or even the newer win-win negotiation styles, Brian advocates a style I’d call 1+1=3. Some of the results from his surveys suggest that while negotiations are becoming more complex, the competitors for the buyers are behaving irrationally. In the book, he outlines a 4 step process towards successful negotiation. Parts of the process are hard work or even impossible since you don’t know what the buyer is really thinking. However, the process is more than an interesting intellectual exercise since it helps position your standing with the buyer and helps your management understand the parameters of the deal.

I especially found valuable Brian’s discussion of determining each party’s wish list and the consequences if either party walks away. The questioning of the buyer required to validate the wish-list and walk-away areas not only helps you better understand the buyer but also ensures that the buyer has truly thought out all the details of what they want to purchase. This understanding also helps you determine what kind of power you have. Your negotiating power is derived from the difference between your proposal (based on your knowledge of the buyer’s wish list) and their walk-away choices. The bigger the difference the more power you have in negotiating.

By making your proposal better for the buyer then choosing to walk away and then by trading items on each other’s wish list to finalize the negotiation, you’ve created that 1+1=3 situation.

What is your best referral system?

21 Aug

A great question asked on LinkedIn a few weeks asking to share your best referral system.

My answer would be –

After customer referrals, my best referral system is through my peers in sales. We all have customers that we’ve sold to, either for our current employer, or past employers. Often, these customers have purchased multiple times from me while I was at different companies. I also have a network of sales peers that I keep in touch with since we’re often selling complimentary solutions or selling to the same types of customers (either by industry or job title). I often trade a referral into my customer base for a referral into a peer’s customer base when I know that my customer would be interested in meeting with my sales peer. It’s a win-win-win-win scenario as both sales reps get to meet a new prospect via a trusted referral and both customers get to learn more about something they’re interested in.

If you want to read all the responses, then jump to LinkedIn.

Selling by referrals via your network

7 Aug

This blog is about sharing ideas on how to become better at sales – to internalize a selling process that you’re comfortable with, that’s repeatable and ultimately successful. The central idea to this blog is the concept of network-based selling – also called referral-based selling. Selling to new customers is hard work especially the prospecting part of the sales cycle. Why else would we get the big bucks if it was easy! Think how much better it would be to get an introduction to a new prospect by someone in your network that the prospect trusts and respects.

After 10 years of selling technology solutions for big companies I transitioned to selling at start-ups and learned that it’s a different sell. Where once I had the corporate marketing and business development staff behind me and a well defined market and product in front of me, I now had the heady job of selling new technology solutions to new prospects that had not ever heard of my company and were not eager to answer my phone call. Where I once had brand awarness, I now pushed value proposition. But thru these 20 years of selling, I’ve continued to improve my selling skills, learning from mentors, keeping what worked for me and throwing out what didn’t.

So I hope you find some valuable tidbits of information in here, some that you’ll think is obvious but a good reminder and others that you’ll think are interesting enough to try for yourself. And if you do try, please share your results with the community.

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