Steve Reilly - Negotiating with Tough Customers: Never Take No! for a Final Answer and Other Tactics to Win at the Bargaining Table

NEGOTIATING WITH TOUGH CUSTOMERS

Never Take No! for a Final Answer and Other Tractics to Win at the Bargaining Table

STEVE REILLY

Copyright 2016 by Steve Reilly

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photo-copying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

NEGOTIATING WITH TOUGH CUSTOMERS
EDITED BY ROGER SHEETY
TYPESET BY KRISTIN GOBLE/PERFECTYPE
Cover design by Rob Johnson/Toprotype
Printed in the U.S.A.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reilly, Steve (Business consultant), author.
Title: Negotiating with tough customers : never take no for a final
answer

and other tactics to win at the bargaining table / by Steve Reilly.
Description: Wayne, NJ : Career Press, [2016] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016010609 (print) | LCCN 2016017447 (ebook) | ISBN

9781632650481 (print) | ISBN 9781632659507 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Negotiation in business. | Negotiation.
Classification: LCC HD58.6 .R454 2016 (print) | LCC HD58.6 (ebook) |
DDC
658.4/052--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016010609

I d like to thank a few special people for providing me the opportunity to refine the concepts contained in this book. First to my business partners, Steve Johnson and Mike Crosby: Steve for his friendship and attention to detail, and Mike for having enough faith in my abilities to put me in front of his clients time after time.

In addition, this book would not be possible without the help of Rosalie Puleo, Jennifer Sawyer, Peter Boyd, and others too numerous to count.

And one last thanks to Cynthia Heidelberg (Sydney Harbor), whose friendship, instincts, and gentle arguments made this a better book and me a better person.

We love you, Sydney!

T he fifth-most-successful business book of all time and number-one negotiation book by a large, large margin is Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by William Ury and Roger Fisher, published in 1981. The book initiated an extraordinary shift in corporate Americas negotiation philosophy from zero-sum to win-win. What was once considered an adversarial, often-contentious struggle between buyers and sellers shifted to a collaborative, problem-solving mindset as it became clear that the zero-sum negotiating philosophy of I win only if you lose did not always fit in a world of business interdependencies and cooperation. The authors recognized that, although zero-sum negotiators may achieve short-term financial goals, their heavy-handed tactics often damage longer-term, more valuable relationships.

For more than 15 years, I was a Master Certified Instructor for the Negotiating to Yes Seminar (NTY) based on William Ury and Roger Fishers best-selling book. During that time span, I facilitated the NTY workshop in almost every industry, country, and business situation to groups of manufacturing line supervisors, sales teams, contract administrators, executives, and others. I also presented the Getting to Yes concepts at executive conferences, sales meetings, and corporate retreats.

The Negotiating to Yes workshop consists of two days of classroom lectures, role-plays, negotiation situations, and a proprietary negotiation planner. At the time, corporate training departments and sales managers selected the NTY program with the intention of improving the negotiation skills of their people (mostly salespeople) who attended the workshop. The average cost of the workshop was more than $15,000 per session and non-negotiable. (It always struck me as ironic that the most popular program used to teach the art of negotiating was offered by people who refused to negotiate.)

With time, I became more and more curious as to whether the substantial amounts of money companies shelled out for the NTY program actually translated into better deals and better skills. My suspicions were fueled by the fact that, through the years, my seminar participants raised the same questions again and again, questions to which I thought we had only partial answers.

After comparing notes with the other NTY instructors, it became apparent that there were common concerns and challenges that came up in almost every workshop regardless of the industry or situation. Simple questions like What number do you start with? or When and how much do you concede on the first counteroffer? and How do you respond to a request for your best and final offer? were never satisfactorily addressed in the workshop or in the Getting to Yes book for that matter. In response to this, the seminar designers equipped us with a set of canned answers as ammunition to fend off the workshop participants who just didnt get it.

The most common question we encountered was What if the customer doesnt want to play win-win? to which we were taught to cavalierly answer, Well, then maybe you should find a customer who will. When asked What should be my first offer? our condescending canned response was Win-win isnt about offers and counteroffers. Its about relationships and shared interests.

In fact, none of these questions and terms appear in this and many other books written by experts on the subject. The word counteroffer isnt even mentioned in the first edition of Getting to Yes.

With time, I began to suspect that our proprietary canned answers never sufficiently addressed the real challenges salespeople face every day. Having made my living in sales since my graduate school days, I knew that most salespeople have to deal with questions like these on a daily basis from customers who refuse to play anything except hardball when negotiating. Selling can be an unforgiving business with sometimes unforgiving customers.

So in response to my suspicions about our standard NTY answers, I decided to dig deeper into the world of negotiation, investing a substantial amount of my time and energy reading and absorbing all the available information on negotiation approaches. With so many books and so many competing theories on this subject, I had a good deal of material to absorb. I spent much time and energy searching for better alternatives to the NTY approach.

They werent any.

The real surprise from my research was that none of the currently available negotiation books answered the most basic negotiation questions. Just as with the Getting to Yes approach, my NTY participants questions were left unaddressed by the most famous and popular negotiation gurus. And as the list of questions grew, the list of answers shrank. All of the books I read answered some of the questions and some of them answered none at all.