Return on investment, whether it be the hard and soft return on investment that we discussed earlier in last session. Okay, we want to be able to reinforce that information with them, reinforce the results by bringing in specific evidence, whether it be statistics or testimonials or showing that we've done this in the past with other companies. What if they say gee, what if it doesn't work? Which we need to negotiate a little bit in terms of, how do we make sure that we explain to them we have the capability and the credibility to make it work? We have to make sure we have promised them and assure them, we'll have an ongoing dialogue with them and make improvements as we go along. So we want to make sure that we use our negotiation techniques effectively to validate our return on investment. Well, how do we do that effectively? We want to overcome objections we may get, and remember we're going to leave about two minutes at the end of our proposal for asking questions and having them maybe ask for some clarification, but at the same time, they may have some concerns and may have some objections that we're going to need to overcome. Well to do overcome these objections we need to find out, how exactly do we let them know that our solution does fit the criteria they're looking for, want to make sure that we can understand exactly what they want. Now to do this, we want to let them understand and know that we understand exactly what their needs are, so we want to locate their goals, their needs, their interests. We've got all that information back and we did our needs assessment. We should have mastered quite a while back, then we want to restate the customer goals, so they know we understand what the goals and results are, so that they can say yes, yes, you understand. And that's right, is also very good, we'll get to that a minute. State the goals, here's the goals you identified to us and here's how we're going to help you using our solution to attain those goals. And what if they say gee, it's wonderful but what if you can't meet those goals? What if, and what this comes down to at this point if they say what if it doesn't work, it's a credibility issue and I hope we cover that early on. Because the credibility issue is very important, established strong credibility, let them know that we've done this for other companies similar to theirs and that we were very successful. But if they do come up with what if it doesn't work, our response to overcome that objection simply should be, look, I promised to meet with you on an ongoing basis to review and talk about results retaining, the costs or the samples of the customers and make sure you're getting the results that you want. Now let me share this with you. There's going to be probably three or four objections you're going to hear over and over again. The most common objections we ever listened to, and those common objections are either price, timing, or capability. Can you do it? And you think about that in terms of the dilemma, if you want something fast it's going to cost you more to get it faster. If you want something that's going to be a higher quality it's going to take a little bit longer time to get it to you, okay? And what about time, and what about the initial price as it stands? What's the initial cost of this investment? Well, you can have it cheap, but it's going to take a while to get it to you and the quality might not be so good. You can have it fast, but we have to up our speed, so it's going to cost you more. You can't have all three, you really can't have quality and speed at a decent price. You're going to have to sacrifice one for the other. In this case, we certainly do not want to negotiate based on price, value yes, price, no. We're going to negotiate, we're going to say, look, this is our price, we don't want to sacrifice the price, we give you an honest price for the product we're providing. Here's the value you need to see, that's where the ROI, return on investment comes in. The timing, well, maybe we can slip a few things around to meet the timing that they have. So we can guarantee them that will be providing our product or service on time. Keep this in mind too. We want to under-promise and overdeliver, by that I mean, if we know it's going to take us two weeks to get it done, tell them it'll take us three weeks to get it done. If they're expecting our product or service to be in place in three weeks and we get there in two weeks, we become heroes. The adverse is terrible. If we decide to tell them, it's going to take two weeks to get it done and it takes three weeks, then we lose our credibility, become not as effective. So keep that in mind. But ultimately, when it comes down to what if you can't do what you say you can do, that's a credibility issue. We're going to make sure we address that early on and right away and make sure we say, look, we will stay with you, we'll modify the plan, the solution we need tto make sure that we get the results we promised to get for you. Well, to do that, we have to have pretty decent negotiation skills. Again, Chris Voss's book, Never Split the Difference is a fantastic book and negotiation, but let's look today too for ourselves a few things we can do for negotiations technique standpoint. This again, goes back to the book Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, and one of the concepts we can do is mirroring, okay? Mirroring is repeating the last things that the customer says to us if it's an objection, it empathizes with them, it gives them a way in which we seem to be empathizing with them or mirroring what they're saying. We have the right mindset that they have. For example, if they were to say gee we like your proposal, but your price seems high. If we were to come back we're simply saying price seems high, most likely they will elaborate on what they mean by that and that's exactly what we want. What do they mean by the price? Do we not show the right value? Is it more than they expected to pay for the solution we're providing? But it does show that we're empathizing with them. Another thing we can do at the end of this, your price seems high or I'm not sure you can make it in the timeline we need is to ask them, outside of that is there anything else that would prohibit you from moving forward with us? Because then if we know that that's the only objection they have, we can find a way to negotiate around that and find a way to make it right for them. So mirroring or asking them for clarification, whatever they may have an objection is absolutely essential to make the sale effective. Another one is labeling. If a customer or prospect seems to be angry or kind of emotional about the decision they're trying to make or going to make and they seem upset with us for some reason. We need to come back with it seems like, it sounds like, it looks like, we want to make sure that we're cushioning or acknowledging their feelings, and if we did make a mistake along the way, we want to make sure we apologize for that immediately and emphatically for that matter. But for the most part we just want to label it, it seems like you're looking at this way. It sounds like you're looking at this way and trying to get clarification at this point as what may be the challenge may be, and kind of deescalating emotional feelings that may come with the objection they may have. The accusation audit, it preempt criticism, this is a really interesting way in which we can deal with and negotiate or deal with objections. And what we mean by the accusation audit is if we know that they may have some kind of a challenge with us or a company or proposal. We want to bring that weakness we have to their attention early on. For example, the example, they're showing here when we're talking about one of the clients will be working with here in our proposals. Now you're thinking advertising doesn't work, and the magazine business is dying and has lost 10000s of drivers asking that question, anything else important to add to this? So basically what we're doing is we're bringing the objection out before they have an opportunity to bring it up. It takes the sting out of it, and let's know we're aware of what people may have said about, it may be a misperception about our company or about our product. We get that out early on ahead of them so that it becomes something that we've already addressed, and they can't come back and sting us with it later as a negative objection. And finally, customers telling this is kind of interesting, I'm sure if anybody has been in business or been in sales for more than five minutes, there's somebody sitting on the fence, okay? And what this means is that we've maybe done a proposal or we're getting back to them after a proposal, and they've not made a decision yet to move forward. In fact, not only have they not made a decision, they've not responded to us in any way, they couldn't answer our emails, that couldn't answer our phone calls, and in all honesty, and in all sincerity, the prospects were working with are busy people. Everybody is busy, everybody has a lot on their plate. Most people are overwhelmed, okay? And stressed, so maybe our solution or our product that we're providing isn't the number one priority that they're facing. And it's very possible that it's okay, okay? And so maybe it's not a matter that they're not interested anymore, it's means it's a matter of they're just too busy to get back to us and give us the due diligence they want to give us. Well that being the case, this question, when it comes to a point where we texted and called and emailed and try to get in touch with them, and to know effect, we might want to send them an email or a question saying, hey, look, I just want to get back in touch. We're not trying to be a pest but have you given up on this project, and in that case, and most times you'll receive a response, and in most cases they're busy, they have not given up on a project, they just have a lot on their plate, although maybe they will get back to you and say, you know what? Yeah, we had to table it, we had to put aside, we got so much going on, we can't address this at this time. Or maybe entirely no we've given up on the project entirely, I'd rather know that then they keep trying to call them or connect with them and really become a pest about it. I'd rather have them tell me I've given up on a project, in which case I'd say, is that forever or is this a temporary thing? Is there a time frame you want me to get back to you? What would be a good time for me to reconnect with you to move forward, and let them give us a timeframe. That's pretty much how it would work with a customer was on the fence, who's stalling, who's not getting back to us and not giving us an answer of any type. So and finally, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier, we want to make sure that we get some kind of an acknowledgement. How can we get them to say yes? In fact better than yes, how can we get them to say that's right? We want to have every conversation with our prospect to be a positive one, and one of the ways to do that is to ask them questions where we already almost like a good lawyer, right? Ask them questions, we already know the answer. In that case we might want to reiterate, okay, here is your goals, is this correct? These are goals and objectives you had for moving forward. These are results you're looking for and the results were that you want to increase your sales by 20%, is that correct? Yeah, that's right. We have them saying that's right, we're on the same page, we're on the same side of the table working together as partners and that's exactly what we want to be. And sometimes we can say you seem to be hesitant about making this decision, and then they'll said that's right. And just keep restating things that we know, and what we're doing is we're going to start receiving trust and support from them, and the facts we're being empathetic to them. And again, making sure we're partnering with them as a team to work together to attain the results they want to obtain from our product and service. And finally, a different way of looking at negotiation is called the Ackerman bargaining project or system or whatever. It's a new methodology, a different methodology of, excuse me, of trying to attain their business, the Ackerman bargaining price methodology really is almost incongruous with what I mentioned before. We never want to negotiate based on price, but quite frankly what the Ackerman bargaining system is w e know what price we want to get, what bottom line place we need to get. And when we go into the negotiation period, we start with sending our investment, our target at 35% over the real number we want to get, and so we're coming in very high. Forget that that's pretty amazing, but we probably won't because we know where 35% over what our target investment is, really what their target investment is for that matter too, what we want to get what they want to pay. So we want to calculate this as we discussed with them, and we talked to them about a final number and say gee 35 that's that's really much more expensive than I anticipated. Say well, what can I do about that? How can I help that? We want to make sure we take a lot of pain and agony to start bringing that price down and you bring it down and decrease of maybe 20% over the price, down to 10% over the price, and then finally hit that number that we really want to get and they'll be happy with it. We hope okay, on calculating numbers okay at 100% of the price we want to get and roughly the price they want to pay. And the recommendation here of course is don't just say $39,000 or $40,000, use nine round numbers. So hopefully they were being critical about really assessing what the cost will be instead of $40,000 is $39,893. And if it comes down to a point where they really can't come any lower, we can maybe take something off the plate that we offer in terms of value. So really then we're not looking at nonmonetary number that we're showing us our final number, hopefully that will become a way in which we get it. Personally I'm not crazy about this because it looks like we're negotiating based on price and we're inflating our price to get to the price you want. I think if we show true value and really solid ROI with the evidence to back it up, we really don't need to go with the Ackerman bargaining method, but it's there. In some cases, it may be an effective way to negotiate a deal.
