Sales & Business Development Blog

To achieve a win win position in negotiation, you have to:

a) sell your own position in the context of what drives your client and

b) treat the negotiation of commercial terms as a key element of the sales process, NOT simply as an afterthought.

When delivering our sales training and sales negotiation courses, we teach our delegates a methodology called ‘Negotiating from the Left’. The model works from the left to the right in a five-stage process. The first three stages represent the client’s world (on the left) while the final two stages represent your own position (on the right), as follows:

The first stage to the model is agreeing with the client the pressures which they face to deliver a solution. Here it really helps if these are external pressures (i.e. outside his or her control). This is crucial to gaining control of the process and it is a critical element of your negotiation toolkit. For instance, if you’re selling a compliance solution to enable your client to respond to a new piece of legislation, you should reach an agreement with them that the legislation will happen and must be responded to.

The second stage is to consider the implications and ‘pain-points’ that these external pressures will cause. You will need to discuss the implications (and costs) of failing to respond to the pressures for change in order to cause urgency on your client’s behalf. With a forthcoming change to compliance legislation, for example, failure to respond could have huge implications on your opposite number. You should agree with them what the implications of failure to comply with the new legislation will be (in terms of cost) before setting out your offer and your own commercial position.

The third stage represents the desires and needs of the client for improvement (and the priorities of those desires and needs) in the context of the external pressures facing them and the ‘pain-points’ they are experiencing. If a new piece of legislation is threatening to make your client in the negotiation non-compliant, you need to agree not only the implications of failure to respond, but also the desired benefits of the solution which you are proposing.

If you have unique added value and a solution that can make your customer compliant, you can estimate the value of your solution to the customer and the pressure on them to select, buy and implement the solution in time for the new legislation becoming active. This represents the fourth stage of ‘Negotiating from the Left’. Always know your value and always know the pressure on the client to act and the pain of not responding to that pressure in good time.

Finally, as a fifth stage, you should introduce your own desired outcome or position. If you introduce your own position earlier or you start by setting out your own demands, you may completely negate all the sales efforts that have gone before and the whole negotiation process may simply become a head-butting exercise. It is likely to become “what you want” versus “what they want” and can quickly descend into a battle of egos. You have to present your case from the perspective of the other person and ‘Negotiate from the Left’. It really works!!!

Written by: Steve Eungblut, Managing Director of Sterling Chase