You Don’t Have to Make Negotiation a Part of Every Sale

I often get requests by sales mangers for negotiation skills training for their sales people when in fact upon further investigation their people usually need consultative selling skills training first. You cannot negotiate effectively if you cannot sell effectively first. Both are processes which need to be learned and applied in the correct order. However over 90% of sales people follow no logical process when selling or negotiating leaving their sales at risk.

Everybody negotiates all the time, at work, at home, and as a consumer and as a sales person. For some people it seems easy, but others view the process of negotiation as a source of conflict to be resisted and avoided if possible.

Negotiation is a process and a skill that can be developed. Negotiation can be described as a process that involves two or more people dealing with each other with the intention of forming an agreement and a commitment to a course of action. In a sales environment, negotiation often involves a series of communications between two parties to form an agreement about the details of a sales solution.

In many cases, it is possible for a proposal to be generated that satisfies the needs of both parties. However, sometimes one or more parties may have to accept less than they had hoped for when they entered the negotiation process. And finally, in other situations, the fulfillment of one party’s wishes may come entirely at the expense of the other party’s.

Therefore, negotiation is the process of navigating your way through each of these alternatives, ideally aiming to come to an agreement that is complimentary to both parties’ needs.

Possible outcomes

There are five possible outcomes of negotiation:

  1. Compete = Win:Lose
  2. Avoid = Lose:Lose
  3. Accommodate = Lose:Win
  4. Compromise = neutral
  5. Collaborate = Win:Win

In my experience when I negotiate I aim for #5 and get either #5 or #4. I know that I do not want #’s 1-3 to happen. However too often I see sales people end up with #’s 2 or 3. This is no good for anyone and can train clients to expect things they do not deserve like unnecessary discounts.

Rule of thumb for negotiation in sales:

  • Unless you have the power or authority to change or modify terms, create new product solutions, you cannot negotiate.
  • Negotiation should never be a substitute for selling. You need to be able to sell well first and foremost.
  • Negotiation is an effective strategic tool that you use ONLY when you need it.
  • The earlier you give away concessions in the sales process the less impact they will have.
  • Be aware of giving sales people the authority to discount. All too often this is a licence to give away your margins too soon and too often. We see this when people ‘cave in’ on price too soon for fear having to deal with potential conflict which usually doesn’t eventuate if the sale is done effectively. However they never let the sale run its course to find out.
  • Discounting is a negotiation tool that should only be applied as a last resort and should have a trade off in it for your business so can you benefit from the deal as well. This is different from volume pricing which rewards people for buying bulk from you.
  • If you postpone tough negotiations whenever possible you will miss learning about new things, getting new ideas, new ways of pulling your offer together as well as creating potential conflict down the track.

You sell when you:

  • Identify clients’ real needs and priorities, create viable solutions that are of value to the client and outweigh the cost of purchase and gain agreement to move forward to close the deal and do the work.
  • Can’t vary the terms. If you can’t vary terms and negotiate and the client won’t agree to move forward with you on the current plan then it is a ‘no sale’. Move on rather than give it away. Giving it away is not negotiating it is just giving something of value away which costs you.

You negotiate when you:

  • Both parties can vary the terms
  • Resources are scarce
  • Agreement and conflict exit simultaneously

Value versus Cost

To help you avoid unnecessary negotiations when selling first of all find out what people really value and what is most important to them.

If you and your sales people are having trouble doing this then you need to improve your and your sales teams’ ability to have quality business discussions with clients and prospects, in particular, their ability to thoroughly understand their customers priorities and business needs and how your products and service can be crafted into relevant solutions that will address specific requirements and create value for the client.

This would include developing their questioning, creative problem solving, up selling/cross selling and solution selling skills.

Effective negotiation in a sales situation requires people being able to:

  • Be Assertive
  • Challenge every assertion
  • Get the real facts before offering up anything
  • Uncover real needs and issues
  • Negotiate late and negotiate little
  • Manage conflict and not take it personally
  • Analyse the situation and the demands and weigh them up appropriately
  • Keep the customers’ needs in mind at all times as well as your own
  • Aim high
  • Respond to demands for concession
  • Develop a proposal with guide-lines and trade-offs (if necessary)
  • Prevent the customer from ‘fragmenting’ your proposal
  • Present a total proposal that ‘adds up’ to a win/win solution
  • Focus on achieving satisfaction for both parties
  • Don’t make the 1st move
  • Don’t’ accept the 1st offer
  • Are willing to walk away
  • Use all their most effective communication skills (listening, paraphrasing, questioning, problem solving, etc.)
  • Apply a process
  • Don’t avoid negotiations
  • Have a ‘negotiation consciousness’

When do you need to negotiate instead of sell?

  • When a client demands an arrangement which is different from what you are able to offer
  • When you are dealing with a tough client who wants to ‘win’
  • When a client and you disagree on some aspect of the proposal
  • When the client will not agree to your initial offer (find out why because some people just like to win and want to bargain as part of the process. This is quite common is some cultures as part of the ritual of the sale)
  • When we are unable to reach agreement, even after many discussions
  • When you can’t move forward unless you change your approach some way
  • When you can’t deliver from you current suite of resources or you need to step outside of what you normally do to win the business (take care as this can be very costly)

I hope this helps put some perspective to selling and negotiation.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Top Tips For Presenting Data Visualizations

So you have played around with your data, made some key discoveries that are going to revolutionize your company and now need to persuade others to join your enlightened brigade. The key is turning your analysis into an effective and persuasive presentation.

Here are some tips for showing your data visualizations to the world:

Planing

  • Decide whether you are going to start with a conclusion and then explain (deductive approach) or build the story through to the conclusion (inductive approach). Think about your visualizations only once you know you want to present them
  • Write out the point of each visualization slide before designing it
  • For each conclusion from your analysis, try several different visualizations before deciding on the best one to display your data
  • If your conclusion is particularly contentious draw it from multiple visualizations building the story as you go, rather than attempting one super slide to explain everything

Visualizing

  • Make sure your choice is highlighting not exaggerating the trend you are showing
  • Love simplicity. We offer loads of advanced visualizations, useful for all sorts of occasions, but the originals done well often work best
  • Make sure all of the data visualizations presented are key to getting your point across
  • Be consistent with your coloring/labeling all the way through
  • Always show comparisons, not absolutes
  • Correlation and causality are not the same (this one slips through too often)!

General principles

  • It is better to be content rich than design rich
  • Don’t make your audience work hard to learn your system – stick to systems they know or link it to something they have seen before
  • Get someone else who has never seen the data before to interpret each graph in 10 seconds
  • Know the weakness of your data and of each graph type and be ready to defend your choices, assumptions and conclusions
  • Be able to show why omitted data is not in the presentation
  • Make sure it’s worth telling people about – without an interesting story, no amount of data is going to turn heads

Remember, if you are presenting directly from Bime you can navigate between full-screen visualizations in a dashboard using the arrows on the top right of the screen. You can also filter and manipulate the data on the fly, edit the colors or settings or even change visualization type to make a point during your presentation.

Black People Past And Present

Over the years there have been many great black leaders News Makers. This fact has caused me to wonder if there was one dominant trait that separated them from others. With that question in mind I decided to find the dominant trait that was present in some of Americas top Black News Makers past and present after which I put those traits into a test so people can see if they posses these same News Maker traits. The test is located at Blacknews4us.com but don’t go yet first read the article.

Harriet Tubman was a runaway slave from Maryland who became known as the “Moses of her people.” Over the course of 10 years, and at great personal risk, she led thousands of slaves to freedom along the Underground Railroad, which was a secret network of safe houses where runaway slaves could stay on their journey north to freedom. Her Dominating Leadership trait would have to be Organization. Close your eyes and Imagine for one minute living your whole life and never laying foot off your owner’s plantation. Do you really think you would have been able to get from Virginia to Canada if Harriet Tubman did not create spend much of her time planning and organizing the routes.

Next up we have William Loyd Garison and I know most of you are saying that man is not black but neither is Bill Clinton who like Garrison did so much for Black people that many have called him the first Black President. Garrison was really good friends with Harriet Tubman naw I know what you are thinking it wasn’t like that they were both just friends in the struggle. For more than three decades, from the first issue of his weekly paper The Liberator in 1831, until after the end of the Civil War in 1865 when the last issue was published, Garrison spoke out eloquently and passionately against slavery and for the rights of America’s black inhabitants. In 1832 he helped organize the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and the following year, the American Anti-Slavery Society. These were the first organizations dedicated to promoting immediate emancipation of slaves. Garrisons Dominating Leadership trait was courage.

OK Now Lets go to Frederick Douglas who probably had only one page or maybe just a paragraph devoted to him in your 8th grade history class. Well Frederick Douglas who was mentored by the before mentioned William Loyd Garrison was born into slavery in 1817. Frederick was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, American Indian, or recent immigrant. Sounds kind of like Dr. king hunh? He was also great at raising British money to start his Anti Slavery News Paper The North Star. Douglas wanted full citizenship, including social, civil and political rights for Black people. Douglass conferred with President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 on the treatment of black soldiers, and with President Andrew Johnson on the subject of black suffrage. Despite apprehensions that the information might endanger his freedom as well as his life. Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written By Himself after, which Douglass published the first issue of the North Star, a four-page weekly, out of Rochester, New York. Fred’s dominating Leadership trait is Honesty imean writing the life of Frederick Douglas an American slave could have got him lynched because he talks about his escape but even with that fact in the back of his mind he decided to tell the honest truth.

Lets go to Booker T Washington He was born into slavery in 1856 on the Burroughs tobacco farm. OK now there was a little drama between Booker T and Frederick Douglas kind of like the one between Malcolm & Martin or Al Sharton and Barack or Pac and Biggie naw just joking about pack and biggie but the drama was that although both wanted the same thing Booker T Washington believed that blacks should not push to attain equal civil and political rights with whites and That it was best to concentrate on improving their economic skills and the quality of their character. The burden of improvement resting squarely on the shoulders of the black man and women. By doing this he believed that blacks would eventually earn the respect and love of the white man, and civil and political rights would be accrued as a matter of course. W.EB Dubois and Frederick Douglas believed that the government should give Blacks their equal rights now not later. The views of Booker T were later popularized by black Muslims, The black Panthers who I cant talk about because if I do they wont play the video. Booker T Washington’s dominating trait Tact which means that you can deal with people in a manner that will maintain good relations and avoid problems. He demonstrated this tact by telling blacks that you do not have to depend on the whites for you success. What this did is inspire blacks to succeed and let whites off the hook by telling them noting is owed to blacks because they are willing and able to do it them selves.

Coming to the stage we have Marcus Garvey who after reading Booker T Washington’s Up from Slavery decided to start the Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA) movement, which urged Blacks to be proud of their race and return to Africa their ancestral homeland. He attracted thousands of supporters to facilitate the return to Africa that he advocated. In 1919 Garvey founded the Black Star Line to provide transportation to Africa however after a few voyages the ship sank due to shady business practices. Garvey unsuccessfully tried to persuade the government of Liberia in West Africa to grant land on which black people from America could settle. So the next time somebody tells you to go back to Africa just say we tried but the Government of Liberia would not let us in. This Black News Makers life ended very tragically after suffering a stroke in January 1940, the Black Nationalist read his own obituary in the Chicago Defender, which described him as “broke, alone and unpopular”. Apparently as a result, Garvey suffered a second stroke and died. The premature obituary thus turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Garvey’s Dominating leadership trait was vision. Garvey had a vision for a new nation for American blacks in Africa and even though only a few took the trip the ability to bring this vision to life was a huge achievement.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the first black leaders that really understood that the power was not in the mouth or the sward but it was in the dollar thus the first march he organized which was the bus strike and the last which was the sanitation workers union caused change by taking money out of the oppressors hands. Many of today’s modern day unions have taken this same approach. King organized The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was a large political rally that took place in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech advocating racial harmony at the Lincoln Memorial during the march. Approximately 250,000 people took part in the march; it is estimated that 200,000 were African American and 50,000 were white. Dr. Kings prevailing leadership trait was Justice which is defined as the practice of being fair and consistent.

The civil rights movement did not only benefit blacks bus it also benefited women and other minorities. Many whites lost jobs and their lively hoods not unlike the abolitionist of the 1800s. So my message to all the black youth that are watching or reading this is to never put all white people in a box many have suffered and died for the rights you enjoy today so just take the time to know all people don’t just rely on what mom and or the media have to say. And my message to white youth is never put blacks in a box I know if you watch cops, listen to jayz and go to Lakers game you think all we know how to do is shoot jumpers slap hoes and kill other blacks but what you may not know is that the elevator you take at the mall, it was invented by a black man Alexander mills. The first Open heart surgery was performed by a black Dr. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and Dr. Charles Drew Invented Blood Banks And Established them all Around The World. I know all of you drove or will be driving somewhere in the next couple of days well in 1940 Garret A. Morgan invented the Automatic Traffic Signal. Look outside yea go ahead you see that grass out there that needs to be cut well that would not be possible with out John Burr who invented the Lawn Mower. So the next time you listen to 50cent or watch cops think lawnmower open heart surgery traffic lights.

Malcolm X who after going on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia shared his thoughts and beliefs with different cultures, and found the response to be overwhelmingly positive. When he returned, Malcolm said he had met “blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers.” He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration and a new hope for the future. This time when Malcolm spoke, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races after which he was assassinated. Malcolm Xs prevailing leader ship trait is that of team work which was evident in his wanting to unite with all races for social change.

Thurgood Marshall born on July 2, 1908 in Baltimore, her is a list of his legal accomplishments
1954 – Wins Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, landmark case that demolishes legal basis for segregation in America.

1956 – Wins Browder v. Gayle, ending the practice of segregation on buses and ending the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

1961 – Defends civil rights demonstrators, winning Supreme Court victory in Garner v. Louisiana; nominated to Second Circuit Court of Appeals by President J.F. Kennedy.
1967 – Becomes first African American elevated to U.S. Supreme Court (1967-1991).
This Man did not talk about it he went out and did it. Thurgood Marshall’s Prevailing leadership trait is Knowledge; in order to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court you must have a vast knowledge of the law.

Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. (born October 8, 1941) is a civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. In 1983, Jackson traveled to Syria to secure the release of a captured American pilot, Navy Lt. Robert Goodman who was being held by the Syrian government. Goodman had been shot down over Lebanon while on a mission to bomb Syrian positions in that country. After a dramatic personal appeal that Jackson made to Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Goodman was released. Initially, the Reagan administration was skeptical about Jackson’s trip to Syria. However, after Jackson secured Goodman’s release, United States President Ronald Reagan welcomed both Jackson and Goodman at the White House on January 4, 1984[6]. This helped to boost Jackson’s popularity as an American patriot and served as a springboard for his 1984 presidential run. In June 1984, Jackson negotiated the release of twenty-two Americans being held in Cuba after an invitation by Cuban president Fidel Castro. Jessie Jackson’s Dominate leadership trait is Empathy, which is being able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. I really think he cares about the poor people he tries to help.