Selling and Negotiation Skills Techniques

Introduction

Designed specifically to help you refine and develop your existing negotiation skills, this "hands-on" concentrated course will give you innovative techniques and alternative negotiating strategies that can be applied immediately on return to the workplace to improve your business relationships and your profitability. You will acquire the mindset of an expert negotiator and appreciate the "inner game" of beliefs and values as they apply to negotiations to enable you to significantly increase your ability in conducting effective negotiations and consistently achieve a "win-win" approach.

Benefiting from a unique opportunity to test critical negotiating skills in a challenging yet supportive environment, you will discover how you can secure a competitive edge whilst maintaining and building positive working relationships with your clients, suppliers, and other third parties.

Objectives

THIS COURSE WILL ENABLE YOU TO:

• Acquire a six-step process which you can use to plan your negotiations so that you can be sure that you have all the bases covered
• Develop and refine the 5 key skills crucial for expert negotiations: creating rapport, sensory acuity, yes sets, needs definition & sending positive messages
• Gain a structure within which you can effectively apply your new-found skills
• Understand how you can build on your own strengths and overcome your weaknesses in a negotiating situation
• Acquire a blueprint which you can apply for each negotiation you attend
• Know how to avoid common pitfalls and effectively handle "dirty tricks"
• Learn about Customer Service and Quality Management Tools
• Learn how to improve Customer Satisfaction
• Improve your people skills
• Learn how to proactively manage and control expectations

Training Methodology

This is an interactive course. There will be open question and answer sessions, regular group exercises and activities, videos, case studies, and presentations on best practice. Participants will have the opportunity to share with the facilitator and other participants on what works well and not so well for them, as well as work on issues from their own organizations. The online course is conducted online using MS-Teams/ClickMeeting.

Who Should Attend?

This course focuses on advanced techniques and therefore participants will usually be middle or senior managers who already have some experience of negotiating either individually or as part of a team.

Course Outline

Day 1: The Role Perception & Beliefs of Expert Negotiators

• Understanding the implications of the win/win concept

• Examining the 'inner game' of effective negotiation

• Auditing your own negotiation style

• Identifying how you can best further improve and refine your skills

• Describe how to use quality management tools and methods

• Build strong customer relationships

• Help influence and set customer expectations

• Measure their own degree of customer focus and be able to apply a variety of methods to get closer to the customer

• Implement improved people skills to enhance customer service

• Improve service to internal customers as well as external customers

• Use skills to build effective relationships

• Pairs exercise: applying the "future pacing" technique

Day 2: The Art of Influence and Persuasion

Creating Rapport

• Building a sense of trust and understanding

• Pairs exercise: the pacing and leading concept

Sensory Acuity

• Interpreting underlying messages

• Explaining the three listening positions and when to use them

• Getting to grips with alternative questioning strategies

• Group exercise: listening and questioning skills

Needs Definition

• Understanding what the other side really wants

• Positions vs interests

• Power negotiation vs needs-based negotiation

• Individual exercise: charting needs definition diagrams

Yes Sets

• Building a history of the agreement into the meeting

• Overcoming resistance

• 'Reframing' technique

• Metaphor technique

• Feel/felt/found technique

• How to avoid making premature concessions

• Pairs exercise: Off the cuff objection handling

Sending Positive Messages

• Understanding the power of body language and voice quality

• The three-step assertive method

• The broken record technique

• Pairs exercise: Sending positive messages 

Day 3: Planning and Conducting Effective Negotiations

Planning the Negotiation

• Working through a 6 step planning process

• Specifying outcomes & building a database

• Analyzing the database and understanding where the power lies

• Building a settlement range

• Planning the negotiation

• Testing the plan

Conducting the Face to Face Meeting

• Working through the 6 step meeting process

• Agreeing outcomes and establishing the agenda

• Probing in order to develop an understanding

• Making proposals and giving and receiving concessions

• Applying effective closing techniques

• Agreeing on action & recording outcomes

• Monitoring the result

Day 4: Coaching on Key Behaviours

• Receiving individual coaching and feedback on current negotiating behaviour

• Analyzing strengths and weaknesses using negotiating skills assessment checklists

• Developing your key learning points

• Group exercise: Planning & role-playing a series of negotiations

Day 5: Breaking Deadlocks

• Overcoming obstacles to agreement

• 'Chunk up' and 'chunk down' strategy

• The power of metaphor

• Applying the "negative consequences" technique

• Diffusing objections and overcoming barriers

• Pairs exercise: Deadlock breaking techniques

Common Tactics

• Understanding Some Of The More Common Negotiation 'Ploys' And How To Counter Them

• Pairs exercise: Handling "dirty tricks"