Tool Box
Issue No. 14 - December/January 2004
Who am I Really Working For?
Understanding Negotiations for Business Development
by Adrian de Brenni
Every interaction with your customer is a negotiation.
Each interaction is an opportunity to gather information, understand needs, and test ideas – and these are essential parts of negotiation. Negotiation is also required to get your offer through your own organisation.
Welcome to the joys of business development! You have two jobs: understand your customer and convince your organisation—and the internal sale is often the hardest.
Negotiation must always occur in the context of your customer relationship strategies. It is the mechanism to implement these strategies – indeed, all your bid strategies.
Requests for proposals are increasingly becoming a statement of what a customer needs – with the respondents given some flexibility and freedom to determine how to deliver these needs. The very prescriptive and rigid ‘specification’ style of requests for tender is becoming less popular. This is a great step forward because it encourages creativity, innovation and initiative. It encourages offers to be designed for benefits rather than being moulded for compliance.
These changes mean that negotiation is even more important. The better you understand your customer’s feedback on the offers you are designing, the more likely it is that your offer will be selected.
Negotiation is communication. The more open the communication the more likely both parties will benefit. Yes, this is challenging in competitive situations because there are many parties. Confidentiality and intellectual property rights must be respected and all proponents must be treated fairly.
Negotiation is building trust and respect. This is how to overcome the challenge of gaining more open communication. A well developed and professional relationship means that each party will know how much they can reveal, will be confident that information is managed correctly, will understand and respect the need to keep some information back and will know tha...
