TBS How to Negotiate Sales Blog

Monday, 23 February 2015

Negotiation Roles

The negotiation exercises we did in class showed me how hard it really is to engage into a business negotiation that will benefit both parties. For the first exercise I was a seller and thought that it was going to be quite easy to negotiate with the buyers, and at first it was. I believe that in a group there is always one person that is more reasonable and one member who is unreasonable, and in my case one member of the buyers side was unreasonable and would fall under the category of a "bully" in the strategy table. Overall we eventually came into an agreement, but it could have been a lot quicker if the two most predominant negotiators would have kept negotiating, in the way we were. I believe that I fell into the category where I was not a bully, but I was not giving in to the demands of the buyer.

For the second exercise, I played the role of the observer and it was completely different from that perspective than being on the negotiation side. The group I was observing played the seller role and believed that the buyers were going to give into their demands right away. This gave them the confidence to go in and lay down what they were going to offer. When the negotiation began both parties were not budging on the price and did not come to an agreement. The sellers were very open to what the buyers would say and even offered to take over their marketing campaign, but it wasn't a good enough deal for either parties.

One thing that I learned from both exercises was that you do not always have to come to an agreement with someone. Also going in with a set game plan doesn't always mean you will come out with what you want. Overall, it was a cool exercise and it made me understand how difficult people could actually be when it comes to negotiation.

Monday, 16 February 2015

Hi everyone! Well what I thought of doing about this post is to relate most of the activities we've done so far in the course. Since we started with all the Fabulyzer project, it was a challenge to approach random people and between interviews and knowing them get to the point where we needed them to be. When I first heard about the idea of the activity I thought that it was going to be easy, but when you face people and the way they turn the conversations makes you feel like you have to be prepared for everything. In some way we started the negotiation the minute we met them. We negotiated information, personal information about them. However, when we did the class activities of the Open/Close stores and the one we had to set a price and discuss the conditions, both of them were really interesting to see which was our first thought about negotiation. Most of us chose price, but what was interesting was to know that we could have negotiated the terms and conditions about time and sizes for the order. Also when we met with the other part try to make the best for both and not losing much. Realizing that sometimes the other part doesn't respect the agreement, and you have to be prepared for that too. What I take from all this is to work in groups and get to a conclusion that you don't really know what can happen but you can be prepared and make the best of it.

Sunday, 15 February 2015

interesting article

Hey everyone,

I read a very interesting article about processes in our brains when we exercise:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3025957/work-smart/what-happens-to-our-brains-when-we-exercise-and-how-it-makes-us-happier?utm_content=bufferb4b12&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Reflection - Julia Sitz

Hey everyone,

i want to share my impressions with you.

In my opinion, we learnt many different aspects by the individual work in this course. The most important point is to listen carefully. When we started our project and had the task to interview some customers, I immediately started to ask questions to complete the profiles. It was not because I wanted to finish very fast, but because I had the next question in my mind and did not want to loose the thread. Because of this I forgot to listen carefully. Many people are not really sure about their insights. During an interview, they try to give a good answer. In my opinion, this is often not the real insight. They tell me the consequence of their insights/needs without being aware of the real insights. These can be included in a normal statement: “The kids are not good in school at the moment”. Moreover, I have to be careful that I do not interpret the answer the way I would like to hear it. If someone knows, what I want to achieve, it could happen that I have an influence on their answer. Therefore I changed the way of interviewing. I tried to react spontaneous and asked more

open-ended questions.

In order to be able to be spontaneous I have to know my objectives. Because of that I can listen in an active way. Moreover, it is helpful to repeat the answers. This has some benefits:

I can see, if I understood everything
The interviewee can think about his/her answer and can add or change something
The interviewee gets the feeling that I understand him/her and that could create empathy

I try to keep everything in mind and to listen carefully. It is important that the interviewee feels comfortable and likes to talk about his/her insights.