Negotiating with Backbone: Eight Sales Strategies to Defend Your Price and Value

3. Stacking the Deck in Your Favor

Negotiation between salespeople and procurement is similar to gambling in many ways. Success in both customer negotiations and gambling requires good information, steely nerves, patience, and most of all, the ability to stay cool. When negotiators get emotional, they lose. Much of the gamesmanship by procurement is intended to get sellers to lose their cool. In both contexts, the negotiator who is more in control of his or her emotions wins.

Have you ever been in a casino? It offers many games and many tables. Veteran gamblers know the odds of winning at each table and choose based on their own appetite for risk and reward. Although there are many variables, one constant is ever present. Wagering, like a customer ...