There are many excellent books on negotiating, including some that cover the complexity of managing multiparty negotiations. Rather than covering the topic deeply here, what is important to think through in the context of effective team selling is the question of how to properly address pricing issues in a group sales or customer meeting.

Common Traps

There are several mistakes that selling squads commonly make in price negotiations. Which ones seem familiar to you?

1.   They don’t realize they are negotiating: In the course of a sales meeting, one of the customer stakeholders asks a question about price or terms. When teams sell, they tend to do a lot of finding and pleasing. So, when a customer asks a question about service guarantees, someone on the team replies, “Absolutely, we can do that!” And for a question on whether your firm offers discounts, someone feels comfortable remarking, “Our fees take into account the relationship.” As good-hearted as those instincts are, they are misplaced at such moments. Increasingly account executives and sales teams field pricing-related comments and questions from very sharp negotiators, including procurement officers, senior-level finance executives, and private equity sponsors. They know how to negotiate and know when the counterparty doesn’t. They take advantage of this mismatch, usually for their gain and the seller’s loss. Casual comments from the selling team convey to the other party that you will cave—both on guarantees and discounts.

2.   They don’t prepare for it: Negotiating well is tough enough when it is done between two people. Adding bodies, voices, and perceptions on both client and seller sides of the table makes it way more complex to manage effectively. Even a well-prepared sales executive can be undone, as in the previous situation, by an overeager colleague who has not been properly prepared for what may appear to be an insignificant or uncomfortable moment. Skilled negotiators have an uncanny ability to find the weakest link, and on your selling squad there may be more than one.

3.   They respond to tactics: As a salesperson, you probably like the notion of win-win negotiating outcomes. However, you may find that many of your client counterparts are just fine with win-lose outcomes when negotiating price and terms with you. Among the gems that you may have seen buyers use are:

   Making ultimatums, such as take it or leave it positions

   Using emotional traps such as mock outrage

   Bringing up past mistakes your firm made

   Appealing to your sense of fairness, reminding you about how much work they have given you in the past

   Making empty promises, as in “We’ll take care of you down the road”

   Using silence

   Walking away from the bargaining table

If as an experienced salesperson these sorts of tactics make you uncomfortable, how would you imagine your fellow selling squad members—senior executive, subject matter expert, technician, junior colleague—feel at those moments? How will they respond?

These tactics are designed to make you and team members feel replaceable, commodified, and desperate for the agreement on any terms. Customers use them because they often work.

4.   They get defensive: The procurement officer, for example, before you even begin your opening comments, flips to the part of your book that contains the fee proposal, whistles, smiles at her colleagues, and states, “Wow, these fees are way high.” Even more so in front of your own colleagues, it can feel as though you and your organization are being attacked. Your body, in response, goes into survival mode and triggers a fight-or-flight reaction—in this case fight. Your team’s response may be to defend why you structured the fees the way you did, how competitive they are in the market, and how great your firm is. Perhaps your senior-level executive also jumps in to defend the fee levels. Despite all the factual information in the world, what gets transmitted to the other side of the table is desperation, weakness, and digging into a set position on price. Beyond that, this curveball succeeds in throws you and your team off-balance, off your agenda, and away from your game plan for the meeting.

5.   They avoid the topic: Here is the other side of that fight-or-flight impulse. In this case, you or someone on your team replies that fees are important but so is value; you then shift to that part of your presentation where you feel you show the strongest value. You and your team are human and it may feel natural to respond to the instinct to go into flight mode. When price discussions are left unaddressed, rest assured, they will return.

6.   They feel no leverage: When you sell into a very competitive market and, when a prospect is sizeable and attractive, it can feel as though the client has all the cards and you have none. Discussing price and terms at such moments put you and your team in a position where you can only win by giving up things and heading for a lose-win outcome.

7.   They feel compelled to fill the silence: Experienced negotiators often choose to use silence at the negotiating table because it makes talkers and pleasers—including many salespeople—and inexperienced presenters want to reduce the tension in the moment. This signals weakness and gives an information advantage to your counterpart.

The Complexity of a Group Negotiation

During a sales meeting, selling squads can find themselves in the middle of a group negotiation. There may be disagreements within the buying team about certain issues, and there could be rifts within your own selling squad on certain points. Negotiating skillfully is an advanced selling skill. Negotiating effectively with a group of buyers, as a team of sellers, is significantly more complex. Max Bazerman and Margaret Neale in their book, Negotiating Rationally, state it well:

The dynamics of group negotiation are far more complex than those of two-party negotiations. With two parties, there are two sets of interests and one interaction. With three parties, the network grows to three sets of individual interests, three possible interactions between any two players, and one interaction of all three. . . . This web of interests and relationships become increasingly complex as the numbers grow. (Bazerman & Neale, 1992, p. 128)

Best Practices for Negotiating in a Group Sales Meeting

Here are some reminders for how you and your team can feel prepared for those moments where price pressure is applied:

   Know when you’re negotiating: This goes for both you and your team. As Linda Richardson put it in her classic sales book, Stop Telling, Start Selling, “any time you are discussing price or terms, you have crossed the fine line between selling and negotiating.” (Richardson, 1998, p. 83)

   Know your process: There are many effective processes on the topic of negotiations. When a price objection or demand gets put on the table by a customer, you should first, know how you are going to acknowledge it, think about the questions you’re going to ask to better understand what’s behind the comment or demand, before finally attempting to resolve it.

For example, let’s say that a customer demands, “I need this done by Friday!” A novice selling squad may look at each other and, in the heat of the moment, agree to this demand which is going to be nearly impossible to deliver.

Consider an alternative to the same demand:

Acknowledge: “It seems like there’s some urgency.”

Question: “What’s driving this?”

In response, let’s imagine that the customer’s response is: “We’re getting a lot of heat from senior management on this.”

Respond: “It sounds like the urgency is being driven by all the visibility around this project. We proposed a delivery date of one week from Wednesday, to ensure a seamless installation with zero errors or drama—especially important given senior management’s focus on this.” (Silence)

This exchange demonstrates confidence, positions you to gain information, and enables you to emphasize preparation and value.

   Prepare individually: Experienced salespeople know, or should know, that among the things they need to sort through in advance of a mutual-gains negotiation are: the issues on the table; the interests of each party (meaning what are the parties trying to accomplish, not what they are demanding); the alternatives available to each party to meet their interests; and the criteria against which both parties can determine that they are getting what they need from an agreement. They know to also consider what commitments and relationship outcomes they are seeking. With multiple stakeholders, the job is tougher as each customer stakeholder is likely to vary in its interests.

   Prepare as a group: Part of your go-time preparation should include discussing who on your team will handle pricing-related questions, and what other team members should be doing at that time. If for your Practice session, you have recruited someone from outside the pitch team to role-play the client, this would be a great opportunity for them to help you practice your response.

   Practice silence: Now we’re not talking about lighting incense and staging a séance. The tactic of silence can also be used by your selling squad. Remember how the example in the “Know your process” paragraph above ended with silence? It’s critical at high-stakes moments—such as those where profit margin is created or lost—that you and your team have sorted out roles. This includes who will take the lead in discussing price and, importantly, what everyone else will be doing at that time. Even if that thing that everyone else is doing is . . . not talking. There’s an old adage in negotiating that “he who talks first loses.” Practice this a few times so that your colleagues with less experience at the negotiating table get comfortable with resisting their big-hearted instincts to fill the silence and, instead, contribute to the success of a well-planned moment.

   Gain alignment as a selling team: Everyone, including those on your team, has interests which may diverge from your own. You can imagine how a member of your team who wants the business and feels strongly that your firm’s fees are expensive may, in the actual client meeting, signal through his or her language or body language that there is room to move. Resolving differences, again, does not mean gaining consensus. Decision rights should go to the people who are in the best position to make the call. It’s important that everyone has a chance to be fully heard before decision making and that everyone understands and is aligned with the approach that the team will take during the meeting, even if a team member disagrees. There should be no surprises among the selling squad when discussing price or terms with a customer.

   Understand group dynamics: It is easy in high-stakes moments to view the client side of the table as a monolith, fully aligned in its interests. In reality, there are likely to be all sorts of different views and relationships among them—only a fraction of which you can see. Understand also that, when someone on their side pushes on price, it may have more to do with advancing an internal agenda among colleagues than it has to do with your proposal’s appeal. Recognize in those moments that by acknowledging and listening to, rather than battling, that stakeholder in the group setting, you allow that person to advance his or her internal agenda and save face among colleagues, without making any commitments on the spot.

   Avoid seeking agreements in a group setting: The simplest way to “get to yes” is to leverage sales meetings to gain and give information that will help the client make a vendor choice, and the seller to qualify the opportunity. Exploring needs behind demands and testing your value proposition are ways to put you in a better position to negotiate fees when you are ready. Know the roles of the client stakeholders and, where possible, seek agreement to negotiate price and terms in a separate, one-on-one meeting.

   Show your value: A favorite line among professional services firms is “We bring a lot of value.” If you’re willing to take a step back from that familiar phrase, it’s hard to get away from the fact that this conveys nothing. Value is defined in terms that are meaningful to client stakeholders. Assuming your selling efforts have been focused on gaining an information advantage over your competitors, this is the time to link the components of your proposal to customer needs. The stronger the perceived value to the client of what you bring, the more pricing leverage you have and, in turn, the more confident you will feel at these moments. Selling squad members can help draw those links, directing their comments to their closest counterpart and leveraging their understanding of that stakeholder’s challenges.

   Know your “BATNA”: Those familiar with the seminal negotiating book, Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project (Fisher & Ury, 2011), will recognize the acronym BATNA, which stands for the “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” In other words, your selling squad should be able to define what you will do if you’re unable to reach an agreement. Life will most certainly go on. As a salesperson, it’s natural to see only your individual interests in a deal. Consider the broader interests of your organization in this deal; perhaps it is penetrating a new channel, a new geographic territory, winning a new account, increasing your share or wallet with a customer, or shutting out the competition from this account. There is always another pathway to each of these interests. Knowing those pathways, and sharing them with your team, allows your selling squad to feel confident and poised at those moments when others cave.

Negotiating is an advanced selling skill. Multiparty negotiations fall more in the territory of experienced lawyers than they do for salespeople. What’s most important here as a selling squad leader is for you to appreciate the complexity. This awareness will cause you to tread carefully and coach your team to do the same. Breaking it down into pieces, gaining more information before responding, stressing value, and seeking one-on-one opportunities to focus on price enable you to handle tricky pricing questions in stride.