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29Empathy and Outcome: The Dual Process Approach

You’ve learned that effective sales negotiation is the process of winning for your team and preserving the relationship. But the objective is not the relationship. The goal of effective sales negotiation is making a profitable deal for your company and delivering value to your customer.

Don’t get me wrong—relationships matter. I just want to be crystal clear that your goal is inking a good deal. Salespeople who forget this truth are doomed to mediocrity because they’re good at making friends and bad at negotiating outcomes that maximize profit for their company, value for their customers, and income for themselves.

Salespeople who fall into this trap are often exceptional at perceiving and responding to the emotions of others. People like them, and they are eager to please people. But they blow it in sales negotiations because the relationships keep getting in the way. They believe that “win-win” equates to the other side of the table being happy.

Because they cannot regulate their disruptive emotional need to be liked and accepted, they hand over the company’s profits and their commission check to these “friends” who are more than happy to take it. Their eagerness to please stakeholders derails them at the negotiation table.

At the sales negotiation table, you are there to make deals, not friends. The outcome you seek is not the relationship. It’s negotiating the best deal possible for your team.

This does not mean that the ...