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Think! Inc. - business negotiation, redefined

Most Corporations Would Not Know a Good Sales Deal… Even If It Hit Them On the Head

Corporations Unknowingly Give Away Millions Each Year Due to Bad Sales Deals

CHICAGO – Imagine you’re a Fortune 500 sales executive working on a critical $100 million deal. Would you know a great business deal if it was presented to you? Even though it seems such a simple and obvious question, the majority of corporate executives cannot answer this question, leading to serious revenue loss and missed opportunities, according to Steve Thompson, Partner and Vice President of customer solutions for Think! Inc., a progressive business negotiation firm.

“In my meetings with executives, this is the one question I always ask, and virtually no one can answer me. The scary issue with not knowing what you want from a deal is that you’re often ready to accept just about anything and even give away the farm just to get a deal signed,” stated Thompson. “Now imagine a sales force of more than 3,000 people and the potential value they are giving away each and every day. Without an understanding of what a company needs and expects from a deal, corporations may be losing millions in net revenue.”

While many corporations have invested significant time, effort and money in sales skills training and sales processes, the sales teams are still not creating better deals for their companies. According to Thompson, although these companies have taught their employees to sell more proficiently, they haven’t painted the target of what they want them to sell to. Without a clear understanding of a great deal for the corporation, sales executives and sales teams do not know what they are aiming for and will often miss the mark of bringing in true value to a deal.

Two of the most common mistakes sales professionals make during negotiations are offering deep discounts and giving away ancillary products or services. Sales teams often discount products and services much more often than they need to and offer deeper discounts than necessary. By offering such discounts, they willingly hand over their margins and any chance to make a significant profit on the deal.

In addition, ancillary products or services have an innate value that can be added to a deal. By casually giving these items away, sales teams unknowingly devalue what they’ve provided to the customer. So not only have they missed an opportunity to add value to the negotiation for the customer, they have also reduced the company’s short- and long-term profit on the deal.

To establish this target for sales professionals, Thompson recommends companies create a negotiation strategy, mapping out the guidelines of what a great deal is, including a prioritized list of desired items in the deal as well as the acceptable pricing levels for its products or services. This will allow sales teams to focus on critical issues as well as those line items that create additional value in the deal, such as longer-term contracts or hard-to-secure quarterly meetings with executives to learn of any potential business opportunities down the line.

“At the end of the day, understanding what a great deal looks like ensures the things that create value for a company are considered equally with the things that create value for a customer, resulting in more consistent and valuable deals across a sales organization,” commented Thompson.

About Think!

Think! Inc., headquartered in Chicago, Ill., delivers high-performance negotiation systems to optimize the sophisticated sales processes of Fortune 1000 companies. Through strategic negotiation, Think! helps companies align their deal-making initiatives with their corporate goals. In addition, the process of strategic negotiation helps businesses understand negotiation from both the buyer and seller’s perspective, as well as act on that understanding to integrate negotiation more fully into the sales process, helping all sides achieve a much more desirable outcome. Think!’s clients include Federal Express, Monster.com, Ryder, Honeywell, Coke, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Symantec and Lucent Technologies. For more information, visit www.ethinkinc.com.

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