B2b sales automation in vendor negotiations

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negotiation is hard it's the culmination of a deal that took maybe weeks or even months to bring home and now everything hinges on making sure you get the discussion around pricing just right it's also super scary and stressful as a seller you're worried about giving away too much or maybe not giving away enough you're worried about your relationship with the buyer maybe you're even worried about how what happens here is going to impact your overall quota for the month or the quarter on top of all that you feel like you have to become a completely different person once you enter negotiation mode but successful negotiations are the key to unlocking effective and successful deals so what's your move do you do the discount double checks you can close the deal now do you stay steadfast in your pricing or maybe do you look to make an exchange of value in order to drive home the deal and make sure everyone's satisfied at the end to answer these questions I brought in my friend Todd Capone The Godfather of transparent selling to share how we can negotiate it effectively to be able to close more deals faster and never get caught again in checking back in on the proposal hell every for-profit company in the world cares about one of four things oh they care about all four number one is volume so how much you buy the number of products Services licenses that you commit to the more they buy the better it is for you number two is the timing of cash as it turns out every company likes money that's for profit and the faster you pay the better it is for you and the companies you're selling to the third one is the length of commitment you want companies to commit to a longer period of time the longer they commit the better it is for you right and then number four is the timing of the deal or when they sign predictability is highly valuable to every for-profit company in the world so if you really think about it that way that's your opportunity to go in and really change the dynamic of a traditional negotiation by laying those cards face up on the table and saying hey here's the things that we're willing to pay you for in the form of a discount this is the reality of how for-profit companies work and when you do it that way I'm telling you the dynamic changes right out of the gate now those are the four levers but when do you bring them up do you just start talking about it at the very end when you've got a proposal in their hands or perhaps is it something that you introduced earlier in the conversation well that's what Todd refers to as being a transparent negotiator what I accidentally stumbled on was this idea of wow if I actually play my card space up and let the customer basically negotiate their own deal it builds trust it makes your deals more valuable makes them more predictable and the upsell cross-sell renewal happens at a higher value too which is really the whole goal now as a seller have you ever been in a situation where to try and get that deal across the finish line you just give away a discount of some kind maybe you say 10 off 20 off because you're trying to get that deal signed now well it may seem like it's a smart tactic to get that deal over however it leads to this If You Give a Mouse a Cookie syndrome here's Todd the irony of giving stuff away for free is that it actually slows down deals doesn't speed them up if I come to you and go rush I need uh instead of net 30 I need net 45 and you Tommy Boy it and go okie dokie buyer is sitting there looking at it going well that was easy what else am I not asking for that I can get right and you just slowed down and eroded the value of the deal and the confidence that that buyer has in your structure the minute you start giving stuff away for free because you don't care about it because your comp plan doesn't say you should care about it is the minute you erode trust and slow down those deals and make them less predictable I think you've got to look at it from a holistic perspective of how the customer is viewing it that they agree with your four levers because they're there for lovers too and when you lay them out that way you're going to end up with more valuable deals you're going to end up with more predictable deals and you're going to build trust to the goal line instead of a road it you gotta believe that now this is a lot of information it might sound easy but the reality is negotiating successfully is hard because well we're all humans right we're prone to error we're prone to mistakes and we're dealing with another human being about a potentially sensitive topic related to our pricing how they might value our pricing versus their idea of cost Etc and on top of that in a traditional negotiation there's so much pressure that we place on ourselves and that the company that we work for May place on us to try and close the deal man it always made me nervous to negotiate right like I just I felt like that wasn't my personality and this process of this four levers like what I teach it's meant to be so head slappingly easy and of course we have reps whose sales experience was there to eliminate standard Junior High going out there and delivering it with confidence because now they have a structure right without a structure you're not confident as soon as you've got one you'll automatically feel it when somebody asks you like Hey how do you price like how what's your pricing structure you're able to deliver in that first conversation that hey our pricing is based on let's say it's number of users or number of locations or a number of visits to your website or whatever the volume is right they're like hey our pricing is based on that at its core then when the negotiation happens that's when you can introduce and go hey as we talked about pricing is based on how much you buy how fast you pay how long you commit and there's actually value in our ability to predict our business so the timing of the deal is really valuable let's use those as the basis for how we get down to that final number and get this thing Inked now if you enjoyed these bits and pieces from Todd you're going to love the complete in-depth conversation specifically on transparent negotiations that we had with him on the sales feed show that's the podcast brought to you from sales feed where we talk with leaders across Revenue Ops and marketing and we bring them all together to have conversations specifically designed to help you live a better life in sales check it out now by searching sales feed show on your podcast app or by subscribing at salesfeedmedia.com