Power Negotiating for Salespeople

Chapter 19

Patterns of Concessions

Now let me teach you about Patterns of Concessions. If you're involved in extended negotiations over price, be careful that you don't set up a pattern in the way that you make concessions. Let's say that you sell equipment and you've gone into the negotiation with a price of $15,000, but you would go as low as $14,000 to get the order. So, you have a negotiating range of $1,000.

The way in which you give away that $1,000 is critical. There are four errors that you should avoid when making concessions:

Error Number One: Equal-sized concessions. This means giving away your $1,000 negotiating range in four increments of $250.

Imagine what the buyer's thinking if you do that. He or she doesn't know how far he ...