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26Developing Your Give-Take Playlist

You’ll use leverage in the back and forth of negotiating to get alignment with the buyer. When the other side asks for a concession—your leverage—you will ask for something back.

For example, if the buyer asks you to lower your service delivery charge by 10%, you may agree to do so in exchange for an extra year on the service agreement.

It’s a simple value exchange. If you give leverage away, it should be paid for with something of equal or greater value. Your overriding goal is to give away things that have a low value to you but a high value to the other side while taking concessions that are of high-value to the other side.

You should never go into a sales negotiation without a plan for how to run these give-take plays. Without a plan, you may give a concession that is valuable to you and get something back that is less valuable to the buyer. Or worse, you may give a concession that is valuable to you but not to the other side, thus neutralizing the impact of the concession.

Sales Negotiation Parameter Analysis

This first step in building your Give-Take Playlist (GTP) is to assess how each party views the five core parameters of a sales negotiation. Leverage the information you gathered during the discovery phase of the sales process on your prospect’s criteria for vendor evaluation as a resource for this analysis (Figure 26.1).