To Strengthen and Maintain Client Connections by Offering Individual Worthwhile Contributions
At my negotiation firm, we frequently discuss the significance of personal worth in effective negotiation strategies, especially in a B2B setting. Clear and persuasive communication is essential for securing profitable contracts and fostering strong client relationships. Being comprehended and trusted significantly boosts your chances of gaining favorable leverage based on the value you offer.
As business leaders, we often perceive value as something our business provides to our partners. However, our communication falls short if it doesn't convey at least two types of value:
• Value that benefits their company.
• Value that benefits their representatives personally.
You generate company value by making the deal advantageous for the customer's organization. This could involve improving their organization's profits, increasing revenues, enhancing their return on assets, expanding market share, reducing costs, or improving specific key performance indicators (KPIs). Essentially, they see the deal as benefiting their organizational objectives.
However, it's crucial to remember that individuals within the organization have their own goals, concerns, and pressures. For instance, a chief information or risk officer (CIO or CRO) may need assurance that you provide robust data security if their company is the target of a breach or is subject to new regulations affecting their industry. Similarly, an ambitious sales executive may want to learn how you can help them achieve performance recognition and career advancement while meeting organizational goals.
You can achieve this by conducting thorough research, paying close attention, and seeking opportunities to enhance value for the individual while still focusing on company and individual KPIs. This approach can amplify your value proposition and make your offering more appealing—whether it's a product, service, or partnership opportunity.
The best way to generate personal value is to provide real, individual benefits to the individuals involved in the transaction. This does not include illicit personal benefits or commercial bribes! Good negotiators consistently demonstrate 360-degree value to their counterparts.
For example, years ago, I was working on an alliance with a Japanese company. One of their technical experts challenged one of our assumptions, and his third-party data was incorrect. He was losing face in the negotiation with us and his team. Keeping this individual and his skills involved in our alliance efforts was crucial. In one of our subsequent meetings, I made sure to praise his logic and effort, which would have produced the correct result with the correct data. His demeanor and posture changed immediately, and his team's did as well. The alliance was successful, and our relationship with him remained strong.
Providing personal value will not only help you close the current deal but also lay the groundwork for future deals as you build strong relationships with individuals who understand that your success is tied to theirs.
Always be on the lookout for opportunities to provide enhanced value. Exploratory conversations may reveal individual pressures or concerns that you can help resolve. This could be as simple as taking extra steps to make it easier for your counterparts to present your solution internally to their peers and decision-makers. Helping them define the current and future states of their business would be invaluable in such a case. And if your solution is perceived as helping them reach the future state, it will have an easier sales path.
More often than not, personal value can be defined as making your counterpart's job easier. A client of ours recently faced a situation where the customer's VP liked their offering but faced delays in obtaining buy-in from his decision-makers due to a lack of time or resources to complete a business case justifying the investment. Our client became a value-added problem-solver and facilitated the process. They helped the VP by crafting a business case using the customer's own data, demonstrating their return on investing with them. The VP appreciated the effort and used the business case with a few modifications to secure the purchase. In this case, everyone benefited—the seller's company, the seller, their counterpart, and the customer.
An important aspect to keep in mind is the importance of affirming the client's value after the sale is completed. We call this affirming client value (ACV), which validates their decision to do business with us, securing their status and our position for the next deal. It is a type of personal and company value recognition that is essential for long-term relationships.
When we broaden our perspective to include the personal dimension, we often discover multiple ways to move deals forward. If you have a solid, quantifiable value argument for a prospect, look for ways to connect that with an individual's desire for productivity increases, career advancement, time savings, or even simpler workdays. Many successful deals and lucrative relationships are built on recognizing and demonstrating personal as well as company value.
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MLaden Kresic, in his negotiation with the Japanese company, demonstrated the importance of providing personal value by praising the technical expert's logic and effort, which helped turn the negotiation around and secure the alliance successfully.
In another scenario, a client of our firm faced delays in obtaining buy-in for their offering due to time or resource constraints. By becoming a value-added problem-solver and helping the VP craft a business case using their data, our client was able to secure the purchase, highlighting the significance of making the counterpart's job easier as a form of personal value.
