Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 2: Negotiate in teams to be more effective

Transcript

2: Negotiate in teams to be more effective · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you are looking for ways to improve your negotiating game, stay tuned for a tip from Never Split the Difference by ex-FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Bite-Size Sales Podcast, where we believe that sales is the most important team in a B2B company, that complacency is the enemy, and taking bite-sized steps each day to get better at your craft is the best way to improve results.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and I'm using my 26 years of experience in B2B sales to bring you small, actionable ideas every day to help you get better.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: In the summer of 1999, I was working in London for a software company, and we had a deal with one of the financial services companies.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was quite a big deal.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember I was working on my own with I think the number two in their purchasing organization.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he and I were going head to head on working at this deal.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I remember thinking one day that this guy who I was working with, who's probably a 20-year vet of purchasing software, knows so much more, probably in his left pinky than I did in my whole body about how to do what we were doing.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: He does it again and again and again, and I would do it pretty rarely.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what was happening was that I was doing a thing where I would go and meet with the guy, but I would run back the information back to everyone back in the office, and they would we were strategize about what to do, and I would go back and do this.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he obviously knew what was going on.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I was the one sitting one-on-one in front of him all the time.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting is this is not how the FBI do it.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: To read from the book, we always worked in teams.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: The thinking behind this policy was that all these extra sets of ears would pick up extra information.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: In some standoffs, we had as many as five people on the line analyzing the information as it came in, offering behind the scenes input and guidance to our man on the phone.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how we were set up here.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: We had Joe taking the lead on the phone, and another three or four of us were listening in, passing notes back and forth, trying to make sense of a confusing situation.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: One of us was trying to gauge the mood of the bad guy taking the lead on their end, and another was listening in for clues or tells that might give us a better read on what we were facing, and so on.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Students of mine balk at this notion, saying, seriously, do you really need a whole team to hear someone at?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that the FBI has come to that conclusion, I tell them, should be a wake-up call.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's really not that easy to listen well.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: We are easily distracted, we engage in selective listening, hearing only what we want to hear, our minds acting on a cognitive bias for consistency rather than truth.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just a start.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Most people approach a negotiation so preoccupied by the arguments to support their position that they're unable to listen attentively.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: In one of the most cited research papers in psychology, George A.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Miller persuasively put forth the idea that we can process only about seven pieces of information in our conscious mind at any given moment.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, we are easily overwhelmed.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So that's from Chris Foss's book, Never Split the Difference.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's interesting going through that.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he's right, there's so much going on in these situations.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, things that we plan for, things that we don't plan for, and it's really tough to get a handle on all things that are going on.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: As you do more of it, obviously it becomes easier, but still, these guys are the professionals, they do so much of this, and yet they still work in teams.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder sometimes why we in sales don't do it more often.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if we did do it more often, what would we do?
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe for bigger deals, we would put together a whole team to work on this.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: We might assign roles on the team.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Someone takes a lead, someone listens for this, someone you know looks at body language, whatever it might be.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: As you're part of a team, you once you've assigned roles, you walk through the situations that we think might come up and how to respond to them.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then we can practice them to make sure that we know how to deal with them as they come up.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, my action item for for you, if this interests you, is when you have your next negotiation, instead of trying to run it solo, put together a team.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to get the book mentioned in this episode for free, simply go to bite sizesales.com forward slash free book.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you sign up on that page for unstoppable.do, we'll send you your book on us.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Unstoppable gives you habit-forming action notes on great sales books such as Spin Selling, Never Split the Difference, New Sales Simplify, The Challenger Sale, and many more.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: In there you get the best ideas from these books, all organized in a straightforward and easy to implement way, and designed for you to take action and transform your results.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: All of the equivalent of three cups of coffee per month.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Start now and get your free book by going to bite sizesales.com forward slash free book.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with anyone you think would get value.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Co-workers, teammates, your boss, your head of sales, even that guy you worked with two companies ago who could probably do some help.
• 6:29
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• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the few times it's cool to do that.
• 6:33
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• 6:35
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