(Continued from page 19) If the buyer does suspect that you have information that you shouldn’t, the buyer might confront you and point blank demand that you tell them where you learned that.

That’s an uncomfortable situation that you definitely do not want to get yourself into. At the very least, once you leave, even if you’ve made the sale, the buyer will go out searching for the source of your information and give everybody who used to be your confidential source, a crash course on how they’re hurting their organization by blabbing to you.

The end result may be that your information pipeline dries up very quickly. So, as we said before, be nice, be cool. Don’t tell them what you know - just be stubborn and hold your ground in the nicest possible way you know how.

Now, once in a while you will come across some information that just seems to be a little too good to be true. And you might wonder if that information was manufactured just for your benefit.

For example, you walk into the buyer’s office and just after you sit down, the buyer gets called away for a while. Sitting on the buyer’s desk, facing outward so it’s easy for you to read, is a memo detailing the proposals that you and your two primary competitors have submitted, and it shows that your prices are far worse than your competitors.

Is it possible that that memo was left there just for you to see, or conceivably even written just for you? So when you get information dumped into your lap this way, be careful, it might just be disinformation. Be a little skeptical and don’t necessarily bite if it looks too good to be true.

A negotiation training program will show you the way to increased profitability