Frank Acuff, negotiations trainer and author of How to Negotiate Anything with Anyone, Anywhere Around the Globe, says, “Life is a negotiation.”4 Negotiating skills have applications almost daily in our personal and professional lives. Some traditional personal selling books discuss how to “handle” buyer objections. The message communicated to the reader is that personal selling is a “we versus they” process resulting from distributive negotiations: Somebody wins, and somebody loses. The win-win solution, where both sides win, is not offered as an option. In this chapter, we focus on integrative negotiations, which are built on joint problem solving, trust, and rapport to achieve win-win situations.5 Ron Willingham, author of two books on integrity selling, says:

When trust and rapport are strong, negotiation becomes a partnership to work through customer concerns. But when trust and rapport are weak, almost any negotiation becomes too combative.6

Trust and rapport must be established on the front end of the sale and maintained throughout the sales process. High-performance salespeople, like Heather Ramsey, take time to discover the customer’s needs and try to recommend the best possible solution. Always keep in mind that any agreement that leaves one party dissatisfied will come back to hurt the other party later, sometimes in ways that cannot be predicted.7

What is negotiation? One definition is “working to reach an agreement that is mutually satisfactory to both buyer and seller.” It involves resolving the problems or concerns that prevent people from buying.8 As we noted in Chapter 2, the salesperson increasingly serves as a consultant or resource and provides solutions to buyers’ problems. The consultant seeks to establish and maintain long-term relationships with customers. The ability to negotiate problems or objections is one of the most effective ways to create value for the customer. Figure 13.2 outlines the steps a salesperson can take to anticipate and negotiate problems.