The art of negotiation

From my previous blogs you may have worked out that I’m in sales, in fact I work in corporate software sales, a cut and thrust environment of dog eat dog (or more precisely rat eat rat), doing deals with senior people in large companies and generally whoring myself out for the money

After numerous sales training courses and fifteen years experience I’ve become quite good at negotiating, I can recognise personality types quickly and adjust my approach, I understand different techniques, friendly, pre-emptive, aggressive, fear of loss, fear of failure, ego building etc...

For the most part I’m good at it, but this week I met someone with less than two years experience who completely outplayed me, he won every argument, got everything he wanted, all with three simple words “no” “train” and “bot bot”

This natural genius is the two year old son of my cousin Krystal (called Brandon) who came to visit, an example of his radical new approach: - we took him to the beach, he saw the train ride and wanted to go on it

Brandon – train

Me – not now, we’re going on the beach, you’ll like the beach

Brandon – train

Me – we’ll go later I promise, let’s just go on the beach for a bit

Brandon – TRAIN – TRAIN -TRAIN - TRAIN

Me – look, shouting’s not going to get you anywhere, you’ll just have to wait...

Brandon – TRAAAAAAAAIN - TRAAAAAAAAIN - TRAAAAAAAAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Me – for fucks sake, ok fine

And so on, “bot bot” is bottle, and if that or “train” didn’t fit he would just fall back on “no”, how do you argue with someone who’s got such a non-comprising approach?

I’ve got a meeting with a board member of a large aerospace company next week and I’m going to give this approach a try, just those three words and a can-do attitude, let’s see how he handles the moment were discussing discounts and I start screaming “BOT-BOT”!!!

- Bod

(I’d just like to add, I had a really great time, thank you Krystal and Brandon for coming, and Fi, it was lovely to see you again) xxx