Sales Tip 1842: Information is Power when Negotiating with Procurement – Jonathan Gardner

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes in the form of a clip from our recent Sales Success Stories Bonus episode featuring Jonathan Gardner. Listen to this:

Jonathan Gardner:You mentioned information is power, so let’s play on the word information and power just for a few seconds. We’ve all heard of bargaining power or leverage, whatever you want to call it. That is all about truly understanding. So having lots of information about your context, the selling team’s context, the buying team’s context, where each of your businesses are trying to go, what your competitors, what their competitors are trying to do. And really try to find out are there problems that we collectively are or could be solving in the marketplace. In addition to that, you’ve probably heard terms like batna, best alternative to negotiated agreement, Zopa. So the zone of potential agreement. All that gets to what are you really willing to give? What do you need? And so that’s kind of the traditional advice.

I just wanted to layer on those other bits about understanding the true context and bargaining power. And that’s where information becomes power. And when you’ve got as broad of information set as possible, that puts you in a position to negotiate with confidence more so than with fear. And that’s really important.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Jonathan and to this full original interview, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1842. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!