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19Preparation and Practice

Stressful situations like sales negotiations will trigger disruptive emotions that can derail you. In these situations, you may find it difficult to maintain relaxed, assertive confidence and the “poker face” that comes with it. Your nervousness can create insecurity, causing you to look and act as though you lack confidence. Buyers can read you like a book and will take advantage.

Preparing in advance of sales negotiation conversations is a key to maintaining emotional discipline. Poor sales negotiators wing it. They leave negotiated outcomes to chance and their emotions drifting in the wind.

Effective negotiators build their strategy and plan sales negotiation conversations in advance. For transactional and simple negotiations, they run through their game plan before negotiating. With complex and enterprise-level negotiations, they leverage the Sales Negotiation Planner (see page 196) to murder board the deal and build a sales negotiation strategy. I’ll walk you through this process in the next section.

Planning in advance of a sales negotiation allows you to:

• Develop an agenda
• Determine best- and worst-case outcomes
• Develop fallback positions
• Understand the consequences of concessions
• Develop targets and limits
• Prepare to flex to stakeholder communication styles
• Review the list of stakeholders, step into their shoes, and consider their viewpoints
• Anticipate and practice for multiple negotiation scenarios

Practicing and running through different ...