ManageSmarter.com offers a well-timed article titled Top Ten Ways to Kill a Deal. I say this is timely in that we have been dealing with multiple employment offers over the past week. These discussions are similar to salespeople closing a deal and, in fact, we like to observe the salesperson’s technique in handling these topics.
The first point in the article is the most critical to success in negotiating:
1. Don’t show emotions
Emotion€”such as neediness, desperation, or excitement€”are immediate turn-offs. Keep your body language and style of speaking emotionally neutral. Prepare your state of mind ahead of time. Repeat the mantra, “I don’t need this, I don’t need this,” until you believe it.
Nothing is more important to successfully closing a deal than maintaining emotional detachment to the deal. An emotional salesperson tends to lose objectivity which leads to them abandoning their selling approach. It has been my observation that salespeople who reach this point lock in on quickly closing the deal at the expense of seeing the long-term implications of the deal.
The best negotiators I have seen have the ability to walk away from the deal as this author suggests. The threat of not doing business with you is the buyer’s strongest tool. A salesperson who becomes emotional cannot negate this silent possibility.
Another related suggestion:
7. Don’t try to be friends.
The person sitting across the negotiating table from you is a respected opponent. Thinking about a long-term relationship or dwelling on whether or not he likes you is certain to cloud your decisions and disrupt your emotional neutrality. This keeps you from being in the present moment and from focusing, observing and collecting information.
One of the myths of selling that persists is the belief that the prospect must be your friend to purchase from a salesperson. Yes, there must be some rapport-building (dependent upon the sales cycle), but friendship is not a prerequisite to closing.
The reason this myth is so damaging is that salespeople cannot separate their emotions from their role. Sales is a position racked with rejection. A baseball player with a .300 career batting average can go to the Hall of Fame, but they still created an out 7 out of 10 times. Sales is similar to this analogy in that even successful salespeople face more rejection than success. If the salesperson ties their own self-worth to the suspect’s reaction to their approach, they will burn out quickly.
As an aside, this principle is the primary reason why so few people are successful at selling.