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

2. Buyer Tells

Negotiating between salespeople and procurement is similar to a game of poker.

Success in both customer negotiations and poker requires good information, steely nerves, patience, and, most of all, the ability to stay cool and bluff. 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 emotion wins.

Have you ever been in a casino? It offers many games of chance 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 many variables are at play, one constant is ever present. Wagering, like a customer negotiation, ...