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

1. Tough Selling: The New Normal

The toughest challenge business-to-business sales professionals and leaders face today is dealing with the games a new generation of buyers are playing to gain additional concessions and discounts. The failure to empower salespeople to recognize and counter these tactics costs corporations billions of dollars of bottom-line profits a year. This erosion of margins is occurring even in high-value industries. It’s happening to just about every salesperson across all industries, in every level of sales. These traps are now an integral part of every purchasing training manual and have been fine-tuned over the past ten years to drain maximum discounts out of even the largest and most sophisticated suppliers.

These buyers ...