Attributed to Harvey Mackay in his pithy book “Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive”, I like this adage because it is, like many other aspects of negotiation, so counter-intuitive.In his view (and ours), you’ll be amazed how much the terms of your deals will improve when you learn to say ‘No’.
However, there is a heck of a lot more to this expression than first meets the eye.
We live in a world of noise where silence has almost ceased to exist. A significant majority of people are uncomfortable with it and seek to fill it even with mundane background noise. We regularly see this manifest itself in countless businesses where we see people in meetings and negotiations talking too much, tripping over themselves to ‘lead the conversation’ or to interject as soon as the other person pauses so that they can post their arguments. It is as though silence is to be avoided and immediately filled...
There is nothing quite so empowering to a negotiator that knowing that they can walk away from the deal if necessary. This hugely important factor enables them to be assertive on their goals, confident that if an acceptable deal is not reached, they have an alternative option. Similarly, the other party will sense this too and will be commensurately wary of pushing too hard. Unfortunately, the opposite is true too! Having no alternative, such as in a monopoly situation, can leave you in a very vulnerable position.
When negotiating, a good mindset to adopt is the one that says everything has a value and that nothing should be given away for free.Yet, far too often well-intentioned or naïve negotiators give away items to the other party when they need not.The irony being that by giving it away too easily, its value becomes much diminished for the recipient.
To negotiate people must have the ability to exchange ideas, concerns, proposals and arguments – in short, communicate effectively.
In negotiation, and in life, everything that you do has repercussions – actions have consequences. It comes back to you one way or another.
Absolutely fundamental to negotiation is our ability to persuade others to accept our view.
“There are, of course, many ways by which sellers can categorise or segment their customers. By far the most common is size or revenue, but this is simply not adequate if you want to determine how to manage a relationship or how to negotiate with a customer. ”
“Value is the extent to which a product or service is perceived by the other party to meet his or her needs or desires, measured by their willingness to pay for it. It commonly depends more on their perception of the worth of the product than its intrinsic value.”
There was no greater war leader and strategist than Chinese military general Sun Tzu. His philosophy on how to be a great leader and ensure you win in work, management, and life is often quoted – for good reason. Sun Tzu also states the “Every battle is won before it is fought” – a point we picked up in our Rule No2.
In our experience, only one third of the delegates attending our programmes spend more than one hour planning, preparing and rehearsing for a negotiation. Often this is done in a café, taxi or train en-route to a customer, or in a rushed pre-meeting, which is prone to regular interruptions, just prior to a key meeting with a supplier!
This is our “Rule Number 1 for Negotiation”. Although it may sound like a statement of ‘the blindingly obvious’, we are still struck by the number of people who fail to ask for what they want in a negotiation. In our view, ‘Asking’ is the most important discipline in negotiation. Have you ever wondered just how much money you may have left on the negotiating table because ‘you did not ask for more’? Perhaps you do not want to know, but importantly you should not want to leave any more in the future! If so, read on...
NewDawn conducted an Advanced Negotiation Training Workshop for Consult Search and Selection at the end of May. The primary objectives were:
"Firstly, thank you for having me and for delivering such a valuable and informative training – I really took a lot from the experience. The opportunity to learn from two experienced sales and procurement experts is something I feel very privileged and grateful for – I was completely tuned in for every second. I learned a lot and some of the points/skills addressed in the training resonated and are aspects of negotiation that I can improve on as a result of attending so thank you, really."
We are delighted to announce the launch of a new programme 'Sales Leadership'. This is a unique programme designed to develop Sales Leaders who can lead and inspire their sales teams to deliver on their missions, targets and objectives )and much more). It provides a combination of leadership and sales theory, with practical application and challenges, specifically designed to enable Sales Leaders to grow and meet their business challenges. At the heart of the programme are two key concepts; transformational leadership and high performance teamwork. These leadership skills are combined with defining and executing a Sales Strategy Framework which provides all the essential tools for sales management. This is much more than just a training programme. The end-end process ensures that a multi-faceted approach is taken in order to ensure that change and embedding is completed, durable and permanent. The programme will be a joint venture between NewDawn and Perform2XL and will run for the first time in May 2021
Quote from a Project Sourcing Manager for one of our clients, who attended Advanced Analytics and Advanced Negotiation Training in Europe (just pre pandemic), and has then been through a 6 month review 1:1 with one of the tutors via Video Conference, and has agreed a specific go forward plan for that person to grow her skills even more—a key part of the Embedding Process. "Thank you very much for the feedback but also for the overall negotiation training. I have really learned a lot and the support from you and Simon was great. The materials we got are also an excellent resource to look into again to refresh the techniques from time to time and before negotiations. There is so much that I could already implement and benefit from in my daily work and I look forward to further practice."
NewDawn conducted Persuasive Sales Training for Consult, Search and Selection in July 2020. The objectives were:
•To help the sales team develop and communicate a succinct, compelling, relevant, differentiating and customer-centred sales story about themselves and CSS.
•To increase the revenue value and customer lifetime value (CLV) of existing clients to CSS through cross-selling and upselling techniques.
•To learn and practise how to ask great questions to uncover a client’s real business needs.
•To understand the importance of the right attitude, behaviours and communication skills with clients.
•To understand the nature and importance of likeability and trust in relationships and how this might impact commercial outcomes
•To discuss and understand the real value of CSS for the clients in order to increase the number of retained versus contingent opportunities
Very positive feedback and reaction from the management team and delegates:
NewDawn has been working through 2020 with one of the world’s largest Sovereign Wealth Funds to help transform their procurement capability. This has included development and implementation of policy, strategy, procedures and processes. Due to the COVID-19 situation we have been forced to operate remotely from their team, which provided extra challenges for all. Their feedback shows they have been delighted with our support:
We are privileged to have worked with some of the best global, regional and national companies. Here is a snap shot of some of those companies:
