Five Critical Negotiation Skills Your B2B Sales Team Must Have

You don’t have to spend lavishly in order to improve your sales team’s negotiation skills. In fact, most of today’s negotiation seminars and training courses are too vague and not a true representation of the types of sales your company performs. Simply put, they don’t address your specific needs. So, does this mean that your company should come up with its own negotiation training courses for your sales team? It does.

1. Role Play: Your company must come up with its own negotiation role playing exercises. Ideally, you want to have two groups of between two to three members. One group plays the role of the customer, while the other plays the role of sales. The exercise should occur in front of peers in order for everyone to get an understanding of how a successful negotiation should unfold.

Provide each team with different goals and objectives. Tell each team individually that they must reach a deal. However, make sure each team isn’t aware that the other side must come to an agreement. For instance, you’ll advise sales they must close the deal because they need the business, while you’ll tell the customer they have to close the deal because of time constraints. This will ensure that the negotiation reaches a successful conclusion.

The goal is for both sides to focus on getting as many concessions from the other side as possible. As the role play unfolds, it becomes very interesting to see what both sides are willing to give up in concessions in order to reach a successful conclusion.

 

You can learn more about the above video by going to: B2B Sales Negotiation: Four Ways to Handle Customer Scare Tactics

2. Defend Business as Incumbent Supplier: At some point in time, your salespeople will have to defend their business as the incumbent supplier. This often involves justifying your company’s prices against a competitor’s bid. In some instances, it involves defending business against an overseas, low-cost Asian competitor.

Your salespeople must be able to define your company’s value, the costs of making a switch and most importantly, the costs associated with buying from an overseas competitor.

 

 The above video and three step process on defending your business is taken from: Stop Losing Business to Overseas Competitors: Define Your Customer’s True Purchasing Costs

3. Cold Calling: Contrary to popular belief, cold calling isn’t dead. It is still an essential aspect of sales and if your sales team doesn’t know how to cold call, you’re dead in the water. Your marketing plans can only generate qualified leads; they can’t speak to the customer and close the sale.

Ultimately, a salesperson has to speak to that customer in order to determine whether they’re truly qualified. Simply put, you can’t move forward unless your sales team knows how to make cold calls. In the end, the cold call sets the stage for how future negotiations unfold.

 

You can read more by going to: B2B Sales Cold Calling: Three Steps to Success – Your Value Assertion, Customer Concerns and Leading Questions

4. Managing Customer Expectations: Everything in sales begins and ends with how you manage your customer’s expectations. This is especially the case in business-to-business (B2B) markets where competitors are a state away, in another country or on the other side of the world.

Because competitors are so far away, a company’s service capabilities in a B2B market will almost always be different. Your sales team has to understand these differences and manage the customer’s expectations according to your company’s costs to serve.

 

The above is taken from: The Importance of Managing Your Customer's Expectations

5. Understanding and Identifying Decision Makers:

Identifying the main decision makers in each account is critical. However, it’s not just about identifying who makes the decisions: It’s about understanding the role they fill and how best to close sales with them.

First, your sales team must learn how to find these decision makers. Second, they must understand what motivates these high-level contacts. Third, they must understand how to position the conversation so that the negotiation becomes a closed sale.

 

Read more by going to: B2B Decision Makers: Three Steps to Tailoring Sales Strategies to Specific Prospects

Only your company understands its market, its competition and its customers. As such, doesn’t it just make sense that you come up with your own, tailor-made negotiation exercises? It does and success involves coming up with some simple approaches to improving your team’s skills.

In the end, you decide how to set up an individual role-playing exercise, how best to defend your position as the incumbent supplier, how to structure cold calls, how to manage your customer’s expectations and finally, how to identify and sell to decision makers.    

To read more about negotiation, please go to: The Role of Concessions in B2B Sales Negotiation

Sales Negotiation: Defend Price, Customer Scare Tactics and Managing Concessions

B2B Negotiation: Preparing Your List of Concessions