(an excerpt from an upcoming book I’m writing for startup CEOs)
We will win.
I’ve seen some extremely strong, successful startup CEOs completely fall down when they get into important negotiations. Why does this happen to intelligent logical people? Bad listening? Ego? They get psyched out? Yes, yes, and yes.
And they don’t practice enough.
My opinion is that it’s a very complex, unique mental process to have good negotiation skills. Just learning a few mechanical negotiating moves won’t cut it; you have to think on your feet using instincts that are only learned by trial and error and by checking your ego.
There is also a lot of inner psychology involved, also complex, sometimes your inner insecurities attack you. Do you actually feel like you should lose in a negotiation. Amazingly this happens sometimes to people, especially those early in their career. You can make the exact opposite move than the one you know you have to make. Beware of this.
Early in my enterprise sales career, the term Win-Win negotiations came about in our vernacular. There were a lot of terms we used to help us build sales skills that we could institutionalize and get all of us on the sales team to speak the same language. Win-win felt good, made us feel like we were ethical people, not the stereotype of slick salespeople.
One of my best jobs in sales was with a company that was a roaring success at the time. Negotiation with a warm lead was thought of as a critical skill in this company, since we had so many prospects coming to us. A good problem to have, and a reason to try to be the leader in your market. Lead generation was “automatic”, so our job was to get them from interest in our products, which they already suspected were superior, to becoming an enthusiastic buyer and advocate for our products. Our #1 position also helped us to minimise discounting, as we were thought of as the “best”.
So we focused much of our learning on the back half of the sales cycle - closing, negotiating, making sure we didn’t lose the deal. We even had a department inside the company called “Sales Training”, run by a guy named Ken, who had formerly been a sales executive but switched to training the rest of us. This was another advantage of our high growth.
When I walked into Kens office at our corporate headquarters, I marvelled at his giant bookshelf. He had rows and rows of the best sales negotiating books of the time, and some similar popular business books, and he had 20 to 30 copies of each one, so you would see a whole row of the same book on many of the shelves. Books about selling, negotiating, partnering, growing a business, entrepreneurship.
I thought that was pretty cool, like I was in business book heaven, and it inspired me to become a voracious reader of sales negotiation books and eventually to start writing my own books, like this one.
We had a new theme each year for the company’s business development, and that was usually centered around one of the books. Strategic Selling, by Miller, Heinen was a very big one of those books that influenced our company. A few years later Crossing The Chasm had a similar enormous effect on us.
All these things allowed us to “over-learn” negotiating, make it an area of confidence, and most important - allowed us to practice constantly. We will win became our mantra. Having a far superior product gives amazing momentum to a sales process, like Nvidia recently.
But… at times we still failed big in negotiations, lost easy deals. Overconfidence? Arrogance? Yeah, some of that, but the bigger factor was just the odds. Even the best make mistakes, lose some. it’s part of reaching for more.
So the bottom line for you as a CEO or CEO-aspirant is to practice, practice, practice real negotiations. Reading and Youtube are great, but there’s nothing like practice to learn skills. Also observe the best people around you, but most important is doing it yourself, over and over. Get your 10,000 hours.