Sales Negotiation Training
Sales negotiation training is defined as instruction in how to conduct a strategic discussion (or series of discussions) between a business buyer and seller, with the objective of reaching a business agreement that’s acceptable to everyone.
Strong negotiation skills undoubtedly contribute to business success. Negotiation skills will help your sales team build relationships and deliver lasting, quality solutions to your customers. Strong sales negotiation skills are absolutely essential to the success of your sales organization, and yet most people aren’t naturally good negotiators. So what’s the good news? Negotiation skills can be taught and they can be learned. In fact, just about everybody can learn to become a better negotiator, provided they focus on building the right skills and attitudes.
What are Strategic Sales Negotiation Skills?
There are a number of critical sales negotiation skills that you will want to ensure your sales people develop and practice. Here are a few:
- Talk to the decision maker
- Determine the customer’s pain point
- Build the relationship
- Quantify the value to the customer
- Know your bottom line
- Stay calm and act like a partner
- Listen for what the customer really wants
- Look for alternatives
- Be prepared to walk away
What are the stages of a successful sales negotiation?
Motivating your sales team is not the only critical component of a successful business organization. Sales enablement plays a critical role in developing your enterprise sales organization beyond a few top achievers. Enterprise sales enablement provides all salespeople with the best practices, knowledge, tools, and resources required to be successful. An overwhelming majority of organizations experience significant growth in their sales as a result of enterprise sales enablement. What’s more, organizations with sales enablement achieve a far better win rate on their forecasted deals, compared to businesses without it. The importance of sales enablement comes down to the fact that salespeople are more likely to succeed in closing deals if they have the necessary tools, knowledge, practice, and resources.
Generally speaking there are 5 stages of a typical B2B sales negotiation:
Stage 1 – Preparation. At this phase, you identify the goals you want to achieve. And then you must identify the needs, wants and desires of the other party. This is a critical step to get right.
Stage 2 – Information Exchange. This means finding the most important values on which the other party will be basing their decisions on. We can find out at this stage what their decision-making criteria is.
Stage 3 – Bargaining. At this stage, you identify what the moving points are for each party. You need to ensure that the other party sees benefits to them, as well as to you.
Stage 4 –Gaining Commitment. At this stage you analyze and confirm the agreed points in the negotiation movements.This will let you gain commitment to each stage and agree to any next steps.
Stage 5 – Taking Action. This means executing on the negotiation ideas These are the actions you need to take to ensure acceptable results will be achieved by both parties.
What is Sales Enablement?
In a nutshell, sales enablement means equipping sellers with the right resources to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and sign bigger deals. Sales enablement, as a function, evolved in response to the evolution of the enterprise buyer. With a wealth of information available online, buyers are in more control of the buying process than ever before. In many cases, enterprise buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they reach out to a seller.
What does this mean? It means that sellers must take the initiative to reach out to enterprise buyers, winning the buyers’ attention much earlier in their journey. This is a task typically associated with marketing. So, sellers need to think more like marketers, and marketers need to think more like sellers – about the day-to-day experiences of buying and selling.
Sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the enterprise selling process. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.
Ultimately, the goal of sales enablement is to align the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, brand management, legal, and human resources to boost seller productivity and improve the buyer experience. In a nutshell, a sales enablement strategy is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.
How can Showpad Sales Enablement Make Your Sales Negotiations Stronger?
Showpad is a global leader in revenue enablement technology, providing teams with a modern selling solution for maximizing hybrid sales.
Showpad will support your current needs and future growth because we help prepare sellers by making it easy to find the latest on-brand content in a central location for every opportunity. Showpad also supports sales onboarding, training, and coaching to maximize teams’ productivity, increase active selling time, and accelerate sales rep onboarding time.
- Sellers can more effectively engage buyers by leveraging Showpad to more efficiently prepare for and personalize sales presentations. Sellers can easily share the most relevant content with buyers from any device and collaborate with all stakeholders in one branded location
- By tracking their buyer’s level of interest through Showpad insights, sellers can optimize their performance, shorten their sales cycles, and have increased visibility into buyer intention
- Sales leaders can identify and replicate their top sellers’ behavior to scale success, decreasing the overall long-term cost of sales
- Marketing can leverage our bottom of funnel insights and buyer insights helping marketing identify the content and experiences that engage buyers and drive revenue
- Administrators can support content management and distribution of content as well as sales training efforts at scale from one unified platform, decreasing the administrative burden of launching and maintaining a Sales Enablement program
Want to learn more about Showpad?
Contact us for a personal assessment of your enablement journey.