7 Strategies to Build "Negotiating Power"

When negotiating the final terms of complex deals, many sales pros find themselves in a situation where the customer holds all the cards.  Because you've invested time in the opportunity, and may have made quota commitments to your manager, your customers feel they can simply dictate terms.  That's a recipe for a win-lose outcome, with YOU on the losing end if the deal.

To create a win-win outcome, you must continually accumulate a counter-balancing "negotiating power" throughout the sales cycle.  Here's how it's done:

• Strategy #1: Eliminate or thwart competitive threats.
  Convince the customer that your product or service is the only one that can adequately fulfill the customer's needs.
• Strategy #2. Develop at least three contacts inside the customer firm.Provide perspective to your solution-building process and information about the motivations and politics inside the customer's firm.
• Strategy #3. Show the customer your ability to see beyond the obvious.
  The customer can't know everything about the firm, much less the market, so being an "outsider" gives you the ability to see situations more objectively.
• Strategy #4. Create the legitimacy that comes from consistency. 
  Remain aware of the strengths and limitations of your offerings, adhere to your firm's policies and procedures, and be willing to explain why they make sense.
• Strategy #5. Position all interactions in terms of mutual success.
  A productive relationship is based upon mutual respect and understanding, and a sense of working together to achieve mutual goals.
• Strategy #6.  Generate a solution that matches the customer's needs.
  Your value to the customer skyrockets when you help the customer to crystallize needs and visualize the right solution.
• Strategy #7: Differentiate yourself from other sales reps.
  Communicate clearly how you, as an individual, are a unique resource to the customer and use your own unique personality to your advantage.

It's Not the Golf Course Anymore

"Years ago, a successful sales rep knew how to optimize their time by 'reading' their prospects," says Rajeev Kumar in a recent post at the Modern B2B Marketing blog. "A day would be spent golfing with a good bet." But everything changed when prospects began researching their options online, thus "preventing the sales rep from deciphering the buyer's intention from their physical actions," he writes.

To compensate, a new assessment process has recently emerged: social selling. "Social selling is the use of Web 2.0 technologies merged with traditional sales strategies" to accomplish what that game of golf did in the past, He explains.

So how does this new process work? He defines "true social selling" by clearing up some common misconceptions about it:

Misconception: "Marketing tells sales when they need to work with a prospect." 
True Social Selling: "Marketing passes leads to sales, and, if needed, sales passes leads that need nurturing back to marketing."

Misconception: Sales [and marketing] must learn to use new email or other tools that require training. 
True SS: Sales can use Outlook to reach prospects, and data is sent [back] with enhanced information about opens and click-throughs [for marketing].

Misconception: Staff must go to multiple websites to get prospect contact info. 
True SS: Staff can access sites such as "Jigsaw, Demandbase and LinkedIn directly through the tools they are already using."

The Po!nt: Save golf for the weekends. By using the latest Web 2.0 tools, marketing and sales can take the prospect-to-client nurturing process to a whole new level.

Lets Win Together!

Rajeev Kumar

Top 10 things that couples must avoid saying in bed

Most of us know about the various things that turn on our partners and the small bloopers that put them off. While enough has been said about how to build the mood for a steamy pleasure session, you probably don't know about things that could spoil the pleasure once you are in the action. 

 

 

Apart from your annoying bedroom habits, extreme intimate gestures, wrong sexual positions, disliked physical attributes; there are certain unintentional things, which, if said at the wrong time, can act as libido killers. It's evident that while having sex, there are several things on a couple's mind but the issue creeps up when couples let these things come in way of those most cherished moments and thus end up killing the passion.

 

It is rightly said that sex is the art of love and it must be done in the most enjoyable and most satisfying manner. To enjoy this intimate and private activity, couples shall let go of all their apprehensions, fears and insecurities. But unfortunately, the looming anxieties find their ways into our bedroom lives.

 

Dr. Harrybhai, relationship counselor asserts, "Sex is to be enjoyed in the present and if any partner thinks about impending things from past or future, it would act as disruption. Saying anything outside your bedroom conversations will become a deviation. Your partner might feel offended and unloved. Understand the fact that your partner will not accept anything outside your intimacy, to enter your isolated sexual moments, and hence such intrusion is highly opposed."

 

Top 10 things that couples must avoid saying in bed:

 

Are you enjoying?

This is the most common and the worst of all situations that couples come across. Though it's good to be communicative with your partner about things that are enjoyed or disliked in bed but that doesn't mean you start interrupting in between the act thus killing the heating passion.

 

Sex and relationship expert, Dr. Rajeevbhai says, "Asking your partner again and again to evaluate your performance and speak out their pleasure level might just leave them irked and it is a symptom of performance anxiety where you are more concerned about how the act is progressing and less focused on the pleasure quotient. You maybe either too probing whether your partner is enjoying or too anxious whether you're able to give satisfactory amount of pleasure."

 

Are you through darling?

Again, this is a repetitive mistake that most couples would make in bed. Sex is something you should enjoy not obligate, so treat it like a necessity of life not a duty that has to be fulfilled each time you get intimate. "If you keep interrogating your partner on whether they're 'through' with the act might sound like you're no more interested in the act and waiting for it to get over soon. It also makes your partner feels apprehensive if the sexual act is becoming a burden on you, so try and avoid being too inquisitive rather let your partner also enjoy the act as much as you did," suggests by Baba Shri Shri Harryjee, a clinical psychiatrist.

Dr. Rajeev Bhai