These 3 Sales Negotiation Tips Will Turn The Odds In Your Favour

Sales Negotiation Training

It’s a non-negotiable fact that when you work in sales in the 21st century, it’s imperative to strengthen your negotiation abilities and methods. Consumers are savvier than ever, and most of them are ready to stand their ground to get the best deal. If you want to close more transactions, you need to know how to prepare for each sales discussion and what a win-win result should look like. Pearl Lemon Sales offers stellar sales negotiation training to help you do that, and more.

What is Sales Negotiation?

A sales negotiation is a tactical conversation (or series of conversations) between a buyer and a seller that seeks to seal a deal. The basic purpose of the negotiation process is to create a consensus that everyone can live with.

In the majority of sales negotiations:

Buyers and sellers explain their requirements and any adjustments they may be able or willing to make.
To establish an agreement, it is frequently necessary to make concessions.
The majority of concessions are related to price or contract terms and conditions.

Sales negotiations can be a one-time event—for example, after you’ve quoted a price or submitted a contract to your prospect—or they can happen numerous times throughout the sales process. They may, in the case of subscription based products and services, need to be repeated every year, or every few months.

Key Sales Negotiation Skills Your Team Needs

Serious consumers normally come to the table with a lot of information, research, and expectations. While it’s not always simple to forecast how your conversation will turn out before you start, the more sales and negotiation skills you have, the more at ease and adaptable you’ll be.

According to research, top-performing sales negotiators are not only three times more likely to meet their pricing target, but they’re also 13 times more likely to be very happy with the negotiated outcome.

Here are some of the primary tactics taught in Pearl Lemon’s Sales Negotiation Training programs to assist your salespeople perform better as sales negotiators without being aggressive or underselling what’s on offer.

Preparing to Negotiate

Before negotiating, a salesperson must determine what their target is most likely to desire and what they are able to offer.

For example, they'll have to figure out:

Why their prospect requires what they are selling (the precise advantages it will bring)
How urgently they require it (and costs attached to not buying)
Their purchasing position (how their purchasing process works, who the decision-makers are, and whether they’ll be present) and budget

Late in the negotiation process, new and unexpected decision-makers are sometimes presented. Other departments may participate. Salespeople must also be prepared for this and understand how to adjust their tactics on the fly if it happens.

Become Better Listeners

Salespeople can TALK. But in a sales negotiation situation, they need to be even better listeners.

Being a good listener entails more than just hearing what a consumer has to say. When a sales prospect, for example, constantly brings up the subject of price, what they’re really saying is, “I have some worries.”

An effective salesperson can pick up on indications that they’re in negotiations for different reasons than might have been stated by letting their prospect lead the conversation and listening closely before asking questions.

Concerned that the goods or service will fall short of their expectations
Concerned that the company may not be able to meet their needs in the long run
Uncomfortable with the idea of having to justify or take responsibility for their purchase

These soft skills are something that even the best salespeople can lack, which is why Pearl Lemon Sales makes a point of teaching them, not just resulting in salespeople becoming better listeners, but also better at deciphering those unspoken cues too.

Objection Handling

There are many resources available for tips on dealing with rejection as a salesperson. However, learning to be a better problem solver is an important part of dealing with objections during a sales negotiation.

While it’s a good idea to come prepared with a lower-cost alternative that satisfies a prospect’s needs, a skilled salesperson should always be looking for ways to add value to their original offering. Offering a discounted price should be last on their list.

The majority of sales objections occur because they conflict with the buyer’s goals. We train salespeople how to lead the sales negotiation toward ways that both salesperson and prospect can achieve their goals. The result? More sales, fewer discounts and better customer relations.

Emotional Control

It’s not uncommon for a rookie or incompetent negotiator to have a sales conversation devolve into a dispute. This means they risk losing not only the sale, but also the client—and any chance of forming a mutually beneficial long-term relationship.

Good sales negotiators maintain their calm and stay grounded no matter how agitated the prospect sitting across from them is, and make the conversation as light and amicable as possible. It’s another soft skill that most sales training programs don’t teach, but we make sure we do because we know how crucial it is.

We also teach salespeople how to determine when it’s time to walk away. In some sales negotiations, simply stating that you’re prepared to walk away is enough to gain the other party’s cooperation. If not, it may prevent a company from becoming trapped in a bad sales relationship.

As part of the negotiation framework, we train salespeople how to always work to create relationships, identify customer needs, and provide solutions. However, we also teach them how to recognize when a conversation has devolved into a waste of everyone’s time.

A successful sales negotiation is one in which both parties leave the table satisfied and looking forward, rather than a “winner takes all” situation. We provide salespeople with the tools and abilities they need to succeed every time, even if a sale isn’t the final result that time around.

Ready to get started?

You could be wasting time and money on sales activities that never seem to result in more deals if you don’t improve your sales teams’ negotiation abilities and techniques.

Sales Negotiation Training FAQs

What is sales negotiation training?

Sales negotiation training teaches your team the skills to reach favourable deals for both sides. That’s right. We said both sides. Most people think of sales negotiations as trying to “beat” your customer in a battle of wits, but it’s much more nuanced. If you believe that your company can provide a valuable service to a customer, then you’re giving the client a great deal no matter the price. However, you still have to compensate your team fairly and give them the resources to perform the best possible services for the client, so every deal you make always has the best possible outcome for the client in mind. Negotiating comes down to ensuring you always give the client a top-notch service at a reasonable price.

Why are negotiation skills important in sales?

It’s a valuable skill in today’s competitive marketplace because many customers know what deals are, especially in the Internet age, which has given customers access to mountains of information. When a customer comes to you quoting a competitor’s lower price for a similar service, responding to that effect is a challenge for anyone. That’s one of many reasons why it’s essential to know how to prepare for a sales negotiating session, control your emotions when you think the client is being unreasonable, and close a deal to benefit everyone involved. Effective sales negotiation training will teach you all these skills and more.

What are the tools you need to be a sales negotiator?

A sales negotiator should have three main attributes first and foremost:

Quick critical thinking skills – You’ll not only need to think of excellent solutions to the problems you’ll face as a negotiator, but you’ll also need to think of those solutions quickly. A sales negotiator should respond quickly to common objections and challenges to appease a client’s concerns and keep their business.
Effective communication – You might be able to think of quick solutions, but you also have to be able to express those solutions in a way that makes sense to your client. You’ll often have to defend price points or services that your client might not like as well, and effective communication skills will serve you well in winning over clients.

Emotional control – To be clear, we’re not saying you shouldn’t have any emotion. Clients are, in fact, more responsive to warm, inviting salespeople than boring, dull ones. The important caveat is that you must keep your emotions under control when facing challenging situations to provide your client with reasoned arguments and talking points.

What will you gain from this training?

Pearl Lemon’s sales negotiation training is bespoke. We tailor our training program to each trainee and identify what teaching methods and topic focuses will benefit your team the most. Roleplaying, or acting out a situation requiring negotiation skills, is a big part of our training program because we find that practising negotiation skills in a consequence-free environment allows us to identify best the struggles a trainee is facing and how to correct them best.

You’ll also be taught by a team of industry experts with many years of negotiating experience. They’ve closed deals with complicated and large clients and faced every situation and challenge in the sales world that you can think of. Their input and expertise will serve you immensely on your sales negotiation journey.

Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!

If you have any questions, please do get in touch with us! If you’d prefer to speak directly to a consultant, book a call!