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This is a skills-oriented training class designed for service professionals who have had prior sales training or at least moderate experience. It is highly recommended as a follow-on course to be attended after Value-Based Selling Skills. Hahn Consulting has designed a negotiating process that is focused on the customers positions and interests. Positions are the customers stated list of demands, interests are what the customer is really trying to accomplish, such as cut costs, increase productivity, protect revenues, etc. Finding the customers interests and what the customer values is the key to success in negotiating a win-win agreement. Since service and support providers are key in attaining customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty, a win-win approach to negotiating is essential.

The course starts with a brief review of personality styles, and what can be expected of different styles in a negotiating role. Next the Value-Based Selling process is reviewed as it relates to negotiating. After these reviews, the Value-Based Negotiating process begins. Throughout the class, the instructors model both right and wrong ways to negotiate. Success in negotiating requires skills as well as process, and students build skills through role playing in scenarios that become increasingly challenging. Role plays and processes used are specific to service and support situations.


The Value-Based Negotiating Process

A process for negotiating is introduced that allows students to let customers win without discounting the value of the services being provided. This win-win approach places the service professional in the role of consultant to the customer. Basing the approach on the customer's underlying needs reinforces the value of services provided, maintaining value-pricing approaches to marketing.


Selling Styles

Everyone has their own personality and their own way of relating to others. Understanding personality types helps students to know what to expect from different customers, and to be more effective in dealing with personalities that are different from their own. Establishing better connections with customers makes it easier to discover their true needs and satisfy them without giving away the store.


Preparing To Negotiate

Preparation is one of the most important steps in successful negotiation, and is often overlooked. In this discussion, several service-specific issues from our research and experience are introduced, including profit margins typically attained in different industry segments and the relationship between margins and discounts. This allows attendees to understand their negotiating "floor" before entering into negotiations.


Creating A Negotiating Relationship

As a negotiation begins, it is important to qualify the customer as to their approval authority. The roles of the parties must be established, and expectations carefully set.


Diagnosing Positions and Interests

This is the most important step in the negotiating process. Customers are usually quite forthcoming with their positions, but getting to their underlying interests or motivations can be challenging. Hahn Consulting's approach to Diagnosing is more streamlined than generic negotiating approaches and very specific to service and support buyers.


Satisfying Without Giving In

If you are well prepared and have successfully analyzed the customers positions and interests, it is much easier to satisfy their needs without giving in to their posturing and demands. In this section, we help students develop their skills and techniques to allow customers to win in a negotiation without major price concessions and other give-aways.


Satisfying With Creative Solutions

When all other techniques have been utilized, there will still be some hard-core, "win-lose" negotiators that refuse to accept our offerings without major concessions. In this final section, we explore the most effective techniques to deal with hard-nosed negotiators and also to provide creative solutions to customers with unique problems. In addition to our service-specific process, we present techniques to value typical service and support concessions that will enhance their impact in negotiating.


Tailoring the Course

Value-Based Negotiating is presented in public seminars twice each year, but most of our classes are presented in-house for specific companies. For company groups, the material is customized to fit each company's situation. To accomplish this, we interview several course attendees by phone in advance of the training. Based on these interviews, the role plays are rewritten to reflect typical customers, situations, objections, and negotiating challenges facing the participants. In addition, we work with company personnel to develop a profile of the typical elements negotiated with customers and to objectively value those features as bargaining chips.

Schedule and Agenda

An agenda and schedule follow. Some classes go longer, into the second afternoon.

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