The Top 10 Mistakes Salespeople Make in Negotiations

Dear friends and fellow sales professionals, it’s time to talk negotiation. Everyone seems to love negotiation as a topic — it’s mysterious, it’s fascinating, it’s something that, as humans, we have to face time and time again in our personal and professional lives. It’s always a highly requested training session (almost as much as objection handling. Almost.) Amazingly, though, there are some commonly held beliefs about negotiation by salespeople that can be problematic in practice. There are also some simple techniques that we can apply to be much better at it.

There really isn’t a magical element to negotiation, as much as intense TV dramas would tell us otherwise (looking at you, Harvey Spector). Like selling, it comes down to having great processes, a positive mindset, a desire to understand the other party, preparation, and people skills.

It’s not entirely like selling, though. Perhaps my biggest concern is that so many people confuse negotiation with selling. They’re really very different. When I’m selling, I’m working with you to empower you to make a positive change — usually by taking on a specific product or service. I want to help you make a change, influence you to act, help you find the benefits of my product to your life.

When I’m negotiating with you, that’s not the goal. We negotiate when you have already decided you want to make that change. We negotiate to find mutually satisfying terms around the enactment of this change. You are not sold because we…