Negotiation Skills
In today’s business era, it is a given that to be effective, salespeople need to embrace the art of negotiation. However, there have been few studies that demonstrate the impact of negotiation skills development on sales performance and business results. A recent study was designed to assess the impact of a sales performance improvement process created around Wilson Learning’s Negotiating to Yes (NTY) workshop.
Enhancing Sales Performance Through Negotiation Skills
The effectiveness of NTY was clearly demonstrated in our study in a large U.S. company that provides a variety of environmental services to industrial clients (hazardous waste disposal, site cleanup services, etc.). The results showed:
- Positive improvement in all skills and performance outcomes
- That 53% of the total revenue value (approx. $2.5 million/year) of individual sales opportunities was attributed to negotiation skills acquired in the improvement process
- That NTY had the greatest impact on improvement in client relationships, better internal staff interactions, and better negotiation outcomes leading to more profitable business
The results strongly support the value of NTY in improving the salespeople’s negotiation skills and work performance. In turn, having salespeople who excel in the art of negotiation has helped the company gain better financial return as well as improved overall organisational performance.
Negotiating to Yes workshop information
Negotiating to Yes and Effective Negotiation Skills
A successful negotiator knows the importance of finding balance between accomplishing business objectives (“keeping your eyes on the prize”) and nurturing and building relationship with clients for long-term mutual success. However, many salespeople have difficulty finding this balance. NTY is therefore designed to teach salespeople skills for focusing on business objectives while simultaneously enhancing client relationships.
NTY is a negotiation workshop jointly developed by Wilson Learning and William Ury, co-author of the best-selling book Getting to Yes. We believe that balance between achieving business objectives and nurturing client relations can be achieved by following three principled negotiation processes: aligning people, exploring issues, and reaching agreement. Aligning people teaches salespeople how to gain perspective on the negotiation and create an environment in which “people issues” do not prevent the achievement of positive negotiation outcomes. In exploring issues, salespeople are taught how to identify interests beyond what’s obvious and to offer options accordingly. Finally, in reaching agreement, salespeople learn how to create win-win offers and to develop alternative options if a mutually satisfying agreement is not easily reachable.
For this study we were interested in four principle research questions:
- Does NTY improve the salespeople’s negotiation skills?
- Do the new skills improve the salespeople’s productivity?
- What is the financial return that can be attributed to NTY?
- Which NTY skills have the greatest impact in improving business?
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