This is a tough position. On the one hand, the sales person has the face-to-face contact, and they must negotiate as the firm's representative. On the other hand, their daily and ongoing work so directly involves them in the client's organization that they become active participants in the client's business. As a result, they often feel obliged to take the side of the client organization. Indeed, they may often feel that not only are they having to negotiate with "the gorilla in the room" (so to speak), but that they are actually living in the gorilla's space and feeling overpowered by the gorilla's point of view.

Clearly, this organization needed a way to provide their sales people with a negotiations approach that would transcend typical approaches—providing knowledge, skills, tools, and a framework for negotiating complex and multi-year agreements in a company that faces the challenges of their unique sales negotiations context, and in an industry that is highly susceptible to commoditization.

As with many other IT consultants, this business delivers both technology and professional services. That means that the repeatable end of their technology services business is always a target for commoditization. Conversely, their professional consulting remains the key area where they are able to bring higher and more value-added services to their customers, and should therefore be highlighted in sales negotiations. However, since their sales leaders actually spend more direct face-time within the client organization than they do with the people in their own firm, and frequently must negotiate deals with only the virtual/remote support of their firm's colleagues, their focus tends to be on solving tactical problems, rather than on selling value-added services that differentiate their product from that of all the other IT companies.

To more fully explain their unique sales context, the firm's network of sales leaders often extends across continents, language barriers, and cultural differences. Many of this company's people work in organizations and cultures whose business models, processes, and norms are very different from those of their internationally located corporate base. Sales people must act as bridge-builders to internal groups and stakeholders who may not be especially aware of a client's situation. As an example, agreements require review by corporate representatives based at their headquarters. These contracting experts have a comprehensive understanding of requirements as they are understood in the firm's immediate context. As agreement reviewers not physically co-located with their sales leaders, they are at a disadvantage as far as getting the client's perspective. The sales leader trying to secure an agreement in this environment must be able to serve as a local knowledge provider to his/her remote colleagues while remaining an advocate for the client's requirements and needs.

To find the right kind of professional development initiative to address the unique challenges of their sales context, this firm looked at a number of possible approaches, including developing their own negotiations curriculum. In the search process, they happened on Lore International Institute and our negotiations program offering. Initially, Lore did not fully grasp the truly unique circumstances involved in most of this firm's negotiations needs. The organization shared this concern with us and pointed out the limitations of our standard negotiations program offering in addressing their needs.

As discussions unfolded, both Lore and the client understood that conventional approaches to negotiation would not work. This initiative required a custom program that took into account the highly distinct needs of the client's sales leaders. The ideal program also needed to address the cross-cultural challenges of a multi-national sales force. The problem with a traditional negotiations offering for this client, and with many of the standard approaches to negotiation, was that they tend to focus on what might be called closed-end negotiations processes. These negotiation models have the sole aim of reaching an agreement, rather than having the broader aim of working together to build a partnership relationship and to develop a win-win situation.

With the kind of relationships this firm's sales leaders share with their key clients, they needed a negotiations approach that:

• Ensures that the relationship is well managed throughout the negotiation process
• Results in an agreement that benefits and nurtures the relationship—producing an agreement that works for both the client and for them
• Acknowledges and addresses the context of their especial way of working with customers

Most importantly, the program had to reinforce and reaffirm this business's reputation as an extremely trustworthy and honest business partner. This company has a reputation for meeting project deadlines on time, and within the budgets. Their negotiations model and approach had to reflect how they wanted their sales leaders to behave as negotiators. The program needed to reaffirm that this firm is not a "haggler" over price, nor a low-rate bidder who then comes back with add-on fees on the back-end of a project or contract. They needed a negotiations program that saw the process in big picture terms and that matched-up the mutual interests of their firm and their clients. The ideal program also had to provide a suite of scalable and repeatable tools that their global sales leaders could use in many contexts, locales, and industries.

Having experienced the limitations of a non-customized negotiations program when we first collaborated with this firm, we knew we had to go in another direction with our offering for this firm, but also, with our Negotiations offering, overall. So vital and compelling was this need, that Lore's CEO, Dr. Terry Bacon, became directly engaged in helping to reconfigure and re-imagine a negotiations program that would deliver the kind of vision, knowledge, and skills that would help sales leaders into adaptive negotiators who would be effective in every unique context. "Adaptive" became the key word to guide our development of this new concept. 

Adaptive became a key word to guide our development of this new concept.

Lore's adaptive approach to coaching is well-known, but applying this idea of adaptability as a key factor in negotiating represents a new concept. It embraces iterative negotiations while acknowledging that they are not necessarily based on reaching a closed-end agreement. As a conceptual approach, this was an ideal fit for how this firm's sales leaders needed to work and blended well with how their business model and sales leaders address client interactions.

They asked us to deliver a program that lives up to this conceptual framework. Out of our collaboration, we created an offering that makes the conceptual frame meaningful and operationally viable.

The program achieved this result in part because Dr. Bacon took the time to directly work with several of the firm's AVPs to create interactive case study simulations and practice negotiation scenarios that are realistic, relevant, and pertinent to their industry. These simulations are incorporated into the program as the centerpiece of the curriculum. They are used throughout the delivery to challenge and stimulate program participants, and to allow them to practice a comprehensive range of negotiation techniques and methods. This simulated negotiation process engages the participants in the kind of adaptive problem-solving required in their actual on-the-job negotiations. For example, the main negotiations scenario details the real-life situation of an IT firm: The firm is faced with negotiating a contract on a just-awarded project, for a new client looking to implement a comprehensive, inventory control system. The sales leaders learn that a competitor is still in the picture, pending the successful outcome of negotiations to get an agreement. If the team successfully concludes the negotiation, then several follow-on streams of work are also likely to come to them. If the negotiations aren't successful, then they could lose all potential future business with this client, or they could only win a fraction, or fragmented piece, of what the overall project might entail.

With this real-world example to work on, participants engage in a two-day model negotiation process that includes preparation and table tactics such as anchoring, framing, bundling, and validating. The adaptability component to the program is framed in terms of helping the sales leaders to:

• Understand their own negotiating styles and preferences—using, among other tools, a negotiations style self-assessment
• Profile other negotiating styles and preferences
• Challenge and stretch the participants, with exercises, to learn and adaptively use of each of the other negotiating styles

The result of this simulation that is most important to how this firm operates is that the ultimate direction it takes is to derive a true "value proposition" that will make getting a deal meaningful to both the organization and their client. Instead of merely culminating in a contractual agreement, participants gain the ability to adaptively transcend the negotiation as transaction and to achieve the best BATNA and the best ZOPA possible for all of the parties. When this firm's embedded sales leaders find themselves drawn into a negotiation that may try to focus the result on price or on some of the co-dependency factors that are aspects of how this firm does business, these sales leaders have a suite of tools and techniques that allow them to turn the negotiation into a value discussion instead of a features and benefits debate.

The success of this program came out of our collaboration with this client, and from the fact that we invested the time, resources and subject matter expertise necessary to fully grasp the nature of the client's negotiation needs, processes, and circumstances. Once we understood that, we were able to collaboratively build a highly engaging, interactive offering that mirrors this client's real-world work situations. Besides the direct attention of Lore CEO, Dr. Terry Bacon, we provided the client with a cadre of professionals, such as Joslin Roderick, a senior curriculum designer; and myself, VP of Business development at Lore. The shared depth of commitment and resources that Lore and the client put into this effort allowed us to develop a partnership that was, itself, a model of the negotiation process we were seeking to impart to their sales leaders.

The Adaptive Negotiations model continues to evolve as we work to extend the concept of negotiation to its limits. New aspects of the program now include modules on virtual negotiation and on navigating cultural differences. These additional elements have extended and enhanced the quality and value that the Adaptive Negotiations approach brings to this much sought-after business skill, by evolving it to incorporate a greater appreciation for a positively negotiated solution that embraces values over deals.

Adoption of this process by this client's widely dispersed sales leaders has significantly improved their sales effectiveness, even in the face of especially challenging customer expectations. Together we've managed to take a significant initial step toward ensuring that this organization's sales leaders continue to maintain their firm's industry lead.

You can download a PDF version of this case study from our Downloads Archive.

For more information about Lore's Adaptive Negotiation program, visit Lorenet.com.

 

Charles Avakian is Vice President Business Development, North America for Lore. He has nearly 20 years' experience as a senior client manager, an account manager, and a sales manager. During his career, he has developed, implemented, and directed sales and marketing efforts for a systems integrator and automated litigation support services vendor. This sales and marketing effort focused on providing solutions in litigation discovery document management. Clients included large law firms and Fortune 500 corporate legal departments. Charles can be reached at avakian@lorenet.com.