Negotiation When Your Deal Seems Lost

At times, we put our best efforts, but still, the negotiation does not go the way we expected it to be. There can be many reasons for it. Maybe your potential customer went in for what your competitor had to offer, maybe your customer was not satisfied with the deals you had put forward and so on.

During such times, you start to wonder how you can save your image and stay intact in this business. But losing a few rounds of negotiation should not make you worry about your negotiation skills.

Best Practices For Renegotiating Deals

1. Avoid Panicking:

Think about how you can contain your losses incurred at the end of your failed negotiation with your potential customer. Remember that this is one of the many negotiations that you have done and there are more opportunities out there.

You will, of course, think about how this failed negotiation has affected your reputation and dented the business organization you work for. But that does not mean your customer thinks you are a pushover. Revisit the deals and offers you presented to your customers and see where you had drawbacks while negotiating.

2. Focus On The Bright Side:

You may have not won the terms you had put in front of your customer while negotiating. But there are always some explored deals and terms that you have not focussed on yet.

Try finding value and benefits in unexpected places because that is what the best negotiators do. Maybe you are not winning all the terms you talked about but you are surely creating valuable client relationships. See if you can tie some other terms with what you are already offering while negotiating.

Make sure your terms are favorable. Do not try to negotiate unfavorable terms because you will lose your customer right at that point and he will not consider negotiating further. It will make you look desperate.

3. Learn From Your Missteps:

Do not get frustrated just because you could not win a big client while negotiating. It will not help and will prevent you from controlling the narrative with your employees and managers.

You need to ask yourself whether there is any particular explanation you want to convey to your colleagues about why this happened and what it means. Executives in the company often serve as role models. 

Therefore, it is important for them to be open about missteps.  Learning from your mistakes and admitting to those mistakes play a significant role in improving your negotiation skills and become a better negotiator. 

4. Leveraging The Future:

After you fail to negotiate with a particular customer, start planning to set up your next negotiation. Do not procrastinate and start positioning yourself for the next deal. Tell your client that you offer them the best deal.

Support this by saying that you have shared a log customer relationship with them and therefore understand their concerns the best. Tell them you have solved their problems in the past and are doing the same right now as well and in the future too.

Focus the conversation on the road ahead. This way you will be able to think about your next renegotiation. This will allow you to expand a particular negotiation into a series of conversations.

5. Undertake A Postmortem Of Your Past Negotiations:

Take out time to analyze why you ended up on the disappointing end of the deal in the first place. You probably did not understand certain interests of your customer or you were just not prepared that well.

Maybe your positioning was incorrect.  Therefore, these are a few of many things you need to take time out for to analyze and make corrections in the same and renegotiate accordingly next time. 

Renegotiation requires you to be thorough with your customer. This means that you should know what is the nature of your customer, what are his interests, what would persuade him to take up your deals, and so on.

You ultimately plan your terms of negotiation on the basis of the same. For this, NeoDove is a great tool as it helps you gather customer information in one place rather than browsing various outlets for the same. 

It allows you to segment your customers after going through the customer profile and plan your negotiation accordingly. You can also set reminders using NeoDove as to when to renegotiate with which customers and at what time.

When To Renegotiate

You need to renegotiate if there has been some misrepresentation in the numbers and other significant details mentioned in the contract showed to your customer. Furthermore, you need to renegotiate when there are changes taking place.

Changes like change in the price of the products and services, change in the revenue of the business, and so on. You need to renegotiate if the information provided by you earlier has become outdated.

As we all know that the customers want the best and what is trending in the market. Therefore, you cannot offer them things and information that have become outdated or do not have that kind of value anymore that they once used to have in the market.

Do’s Of Renegotiation:

• You need to be transparent with your employees and managers about why this round didn’t go your way. Your honesty will be appreciated, and it will help you analyze your setbacks. Master the sales pitch and objection handling techniques to be more effective. To know more about objection handling , click here.
• Focus on positioning your failed negotiation outcome with your counterpart as a setup for the next negotiation that you do with the customer.
• Reflect on why and where you went wrong, and take steps to prepare more thoroughly for next time.

Dont’s Of Renegotiation:

• Do not assume that your reputation is made by this deal alone.
• Do not try to renegotiate unfavorable and unrealistic terms. It will only make you look desperate and a pushover.
• Do not live in frustration, but rather focus on getting ready for the next deal.

At times, despite revisiting your deals and terms, your customer still might not agree to it. In such times, you should let go of that customer. Renegotiating does not mean you stick to just one customer for the rest of your life.

Move to the next customers once it has become quite evident that they are not the ones for your deal and both of you do not fit perfectly for each other. Nothing is wrong in that because you can not please everyone.

Therefore, have the courage to let go of some deals and do not sit around them any further as it will only waste your time and not allow you to look at other opportunities prevailing out there in the market. 

Make sure you make the first move before your competitor gets to it. At times you can see what negotiation your competitor is trying to do and potentially try to provide better terms and conditions if possible.

Read Also : 5 Industries that Benefit from Telemarketing