To look at it another way, imagine that that company had a 10% profit margin. How many sales would they have to make in order to generate an additional five hundred thousand dollars in profit? They would have to generate five million dollars in additional sales to achieve the same additional profit that they would obtain by just doing 1% better in all of their sales negotiations.

If they were able to negotiate 5% better, they would make an additional two point five million dollars profit. And since they would need to generate an additional twenty-five million dollars in sales to get that two point five million dollars additional profit, a 5% average increase in their negotiated deals would be the same as increasing their sales volume by 50%

You can do this same exercise for yourself. In Activity III of this module, you will have an opportunity to review your own negotiating results and to estimate what the impact will be as you negotiate better deals. I think that you will really agree that it is worth it to strive for better negotiating performance.

As you go through the process of negotiating a sale, that are many areas where you and the customer will trying to achieve the same things. You both want to develop a package of products and services that really meets the customer's. So far so good. But when it comes to price, freebies and related items your interests and the interests of the customer start to go in opposite directions. This is where negotiating the sale becomes hard work. The customer is trying to get the best possible deal for his or her organization, and when it comes to negotiating price, the customer's better deal is your worse deal. Therefore, the customer will resist your efforts to get the best deal you can. And this resistance starts early.

As we said at the beginning of the course, the negotiation training program doesn't start when you sit down to negotiate price or terms. It starts when you say hello. We stressed that that early contact time is very important. At this point, customers may be less guarded than they otherwise would be, and may let slip important information that would give you an idea as to their goals, their priorities for those goals, the factors that went into developing their least acceptable settlement, and other important bits of information. However, many customers are aware that they can also create a context and a set of expectations for the negotiation during this early phase in order to try to influence the way in which you will be negotiating with them later on in your relationship.