Is That Your Hand in My Pocket?

Tom Parker, Ron J. Lambert

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781418577360
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Are your customers picking your pocket?

Tired of closing (or losing) deals that are all about price? Feel like you've been out-smarted and out-maneuvered by your customers?

Is That Your Hand in My Pocket? teaches you how to hold your ownwhen you are up against purchasing and procurement pros.

You will learn how to:

• Deal with the bullies, the screamers, and the intimidators
• Recognize and respond effectively to buyer tactics
• Read important non-verbal signals for insights into what the buyer is really thinking
• Choose the negotiating style most likely to get the deal that you want
• Understand gender differences in negotiations
• Get and hold on to power

Passing along to you the same skill sets, techniques, and strategies that have saved their Fortune 1000 clients over $2 billion, authors Ron Lambert and Tom Parker teach you how to hold your own with buyers who are interested only in their bottom line.

CHAPTER 1

WHY BUYERS DON’T WANT
YOU TO READ THIS BOOK

AS YOU ARE READING THIS SENTENCE, SOMEWHERE IN THE world, a room full of buyers-in-training are going over the tactics and techniques that they will use on you. These techniques are designed to confuse you, to knock you off your carefully put-together game plan, to sap your power, and to pick your pocket.

Pretty scary, huh?

You are a professional salesperson. You’ve had lots of product training, and you know your stuff. You’ve had some consultative sales training too, and you know all about the importance of establishing rapport and building relationships with your customers.

Here’s something that you might not know. These people couldn’t care less. They don’t want to be your friends. They don’t want to have rapport or a relationship. They want to beat your price down as low as they can, and they don’t care if you lose your job or your company goes broke as a result.

They are professional buyers, and they are out to get you.

The world has changed a lot in the last twenty years, and nowhere are those changes more profound than in the age-old equation of “buyer” and “seller.” Global trade has brought a lot of benefits to all of us, but one side effect of all this new commerce is ferocious competition.

Big companies swallow up smaller ones, and jobs move all over the globe in search of the most efficient (cheapest) labor markets. Outsourcing has moved beyond sneakers and T-shirts and now includes software, call centers, and even some health care functions. This has created a bare-knuckled business environment that, in many cases, won’t allow for the kind of cozy supplier-vendor relationships that served us so well in the past.

Call it the Wal-Mart effect if you want, but the fact is that the beady-eyed professional buyers who used to make up a relatively small percentage of the purchasing function are now a fact of life in more and more industries. If they haven’t gotten to yours yet, they are probably coming soon.

Our companies, Alongside Management and Yukon, train salespeople to deal with professional purchasing types. Our typical clients are Fortune 100 companies fielding large, multinational sales forces. These salespeople are often calling on the nine-hundred-pound gorillas of the business world, that is, the Wal-Marts, the Targets, the General Motors, and so on.

Our clients hire us because they have realized that they are sending their salespeople into a gunfight armed with a pocketknife. Buyers have moved much more rapidly to embrace the world economy model, and too often, sellers are still using techniques and strategies from an earlier era.

We find that professional buying organizations are now taking steps to actively thwart the strategies that companies typically use to train their salespeople. For instance, companies will now go to considerable lengths to avoid having their buyers develop personal relationships with vendors. They will institute policies like these:

♦ not allowing lunches with vendors

♦ not permitting gifts from vendors

♦ rotating buyers regularly to prevent friendships from forming with vendors

♦ having vendor “shoot-outs” with competing companies assembled in a room or a hallway to bid on a piece of business

♦ holding online reverse auctions with no sales input

In addition, buyers are taught very specific tactics to use on vendors. These tactics can be devastatingly effective if the salesperson isn’t trained in the appropriate countertactics. That’s where we come in. We specialize in helping to level the playing field and giving salespeople the tools and the confidence that they need to effectively represent their companies in the marketplace.

This book contains what we’ve learned from more than forty years of selling, negotiating, managing, teaching, and observing what’s going on between buyers and sellers. The skill sets and techniques that we will cover have saved our clients almost $2 billion, and the number is still rising. The best part is that these skill sets will work just as well for you when you set out to buy a car or a piece of furniture as they do when you sit down with your customer to do a big deal.

These techniques are designed to

♦ let you sell at higher margins.

♦ take pressure off you.

♦ counter buyer tactics and strategies.

♦ make your negotiations smoother and more time-efficient.

♦ help you move the other side toward collaboration.

Before we get started, we want to make one final point. It is tempting to think of the battle between buyers and sellers in terms of good and evil. That is, sellers (us) = good, and buyers (them) = evil.

We don’t think this is a particularly useful way of thinking. Buyers, after all, have a job to do. If they don’t procure products and services at the lowest possible price, they get fired.

It’s better to think about this process the way you would a sporting event. Each side has a role to play, and if one side is doing a better job and beating the other, that doesn’t make that side bad. That side is just better at playing the game.

We intend not only to give you, our reader, the tools that you need to go out and do a great job for yourself and your company, but also to show you how to have fun while you are at it. As a bonus, these same tools will work just as well when you are negotiating with your boss, your peers, your spouse, and others. You will use these skills for the rest of your life.

When it’s your turn to be the buyer, you can turn these same techniques around 180 degrees, and you will be dynamite.

Here are the skill sets that you are going to need:

♦ Recognizing negotiation styles—yours and theirs

♦ Learning techniques for dealing with the screamers and the bullies

♦ Setting a collaborative tone

♦ Dealing with buyer tactics

♦ Reading nonverbal signals

♦ Understanding gender differences in negotiating

♦ Learning the art of saving face

♦ Planning effectively for a negotiation

♦ Choosing the appropriate strategy

♦ Using creativity to break deadlocks

♦ Understanding power: how to get it and how to keep it

♦ Asking why questions to uncover buyer motivation

♦ Using your team for maximum impact

♦ Wrapping up the deal so that it stays closed

As a bonus, we’ve thrown in a chapter on how to buy a car. We are constantly amazed at the number of successful salespeople who absolutely dread the car buying process. Think about it: this is an opportunity for you to be the customer! We’ll show you how to use the techniques and tactics from this book to take the stress out of getting a great deal on your next automotive purchase. In addition, playing the buyer will give you useful insights into the mind of a noncollaborative purchasing person. We can apply this knowledge as we go along.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started.

CHAPTER 2

DOES YOUR NEGOTIATING
STYLE REALLY MATTER?

ARE NEGOTIATION STYLES REALLY IMPORTANT? READ THIS and decide:

One of our clients in the health care distribution industry worked for more than a year to line up a major agreement with a Fortune 100 company. The CEO of our client’s company (let’s call him Sam) and his counterpart at the customer company had several formative meetings and had negotiated most of the substantive items in their agreement. A final meeting was set up to go over the terms and move forward on the $250 million deal. When Sam’s boss, the chairman of our client’s company, heard that this was the final meeting, he invited himself along. Now, before we go any further, you need to know that Sam is a collaborative negotiator and a really nice guy. His chairman (we’ll call him Mr. Big) is neither. He is a hard-charging, tough negotiator and has the personality of Genghis Khan. Even though the deal was all but signed, the outcome of that face-to-face meeting was a phone call from the customer the next day to Sam explaining that as long as Mr. Big owned Sam’s company, there would never be an agreement between the two companies, ever!

So does style matter? You bet it does. Ask Sam about the $250 million deal that got away.

Each of us has a natural negotiating style. This style is the result of several factors: our upbringing, education, role models, what has worked for us in the past, and more. Although there is no right or wrong style, there are times when using an inappropriate style can get you in a lot of trouble.

For example, the style that you use to negotiate an internal matter with a colleague is probably (we hope) not the same style that you would use when buying a car.

Good negotiators and good salespeople are aware of their natural styles, and they can recognize the styles that others are using with them. They are able to modify their styles according to the situation. In this chapter, we’ll show you how and when to do that.

First a word of clarification: negotiating styles are different from behavioral types. Most of us have been through the four styles model (analytical/driver/expressive/amiable) at some point in our careers. These behavioral types are related to but different from negotiating styles. These differences will become clear as we move through the chapter.

One big difference between behavioral types and negotiating styles is that while behavioral types are fairly constant (on the customer side), good negotiators will move from style to style depending on the context of the negotiation. Recognizing when and how to use the different styles can quite often mean the difference between getting the order and getting pulverized at the negotiating table.

Your negotiating style is created by combining the relative importance of the two factors that are always present in every negotiation process:

1. Concern for the people in the negotiation. Your negotiation style may change based on how much you value the relationship and how long you want the relationship to last.

2. The issue being negotiated, such as a supplier’s price or service. This is sometimes referred to as the substance of the negotiation.

We refer to this as the PI (People/Issues) Factor. Some blend of these factors produce the four negotiating styles: conquer,...