Getting a prospect to the point of sales negotiations shouldn’t be undersold as an accomplishment, but there’s still room for error once you start talking details. Allow yourself to be handled by a clever prospect and you’ll find that there can be clear winners and losers in a mutually beneficial arrangement-and if you’re the loser, it might not matter that you closed the deal. In this article, we’ll discuss three ways every sales person can step up their sales negotiations game and improve their wins at the bargaining table.

1: Know Everything

The more you know going into sales negotiations, the more likely you are to come out a winner. Almost anything that might provide insight into your prospect’s purchase can prove valuable at the negotiation table.

A firm understanding of why your prospect needs the product and how they might use it helps, but you can go a step further by considering the ways buyers have used it in the past, workarounds for known issues in your product, weaknesses in the competition’s solutions, and the like.

Most importantly, if you can think of a question you wouldn’t want the prospect to ask, figure out a satisfactory answer for it. In many cases, such negatives can eventually become positive talking points in your sales negotiations.

2: Control the Exchange of Value

You should never, under any circumstances, let something of value slip from you to the prospect without receiving anything in return. Of course, intangibles can make for a worthwhile exchange-if you have reason to believe that you’ll engender goodwill or other intangible value, ‘giving something away’ can be a sound decision.

But perhaps the bigger risk lay in giving things away unintentionally through faulty tactics. For example, naming a price range instead of a high concrete number gives the buyer an advantageous position in your sales negotiations and gives you absolutely nothing.

In other words, understand and keep track of the value of things moving in your sales negotiations. A superficial understanding of the exchanges being made will inevitably leave you unsatisfied at the sales negotiation’s end.

3: Stay Cool

Losing your cool, be it explosively in response to provocation or merely by losing control of your body language because you’re nervous about a certain question, will leave you with failed negotiations faster than anything else. Even if a deal doesn’t collapse as a result, it can give your buyer leverage in the conversation going forward that you’ll find difficult to ignore.

Unflappable sales people win more sales negotiations, period, because that calm benefits you on multiple levels. Internally, taking nothing personally and remaining calm allows you to more clearly view your sales negotiations and take proper actions. Externally, you’ll often find having calmer, confident body language makes prospects better disposed to you and more likely to close.

A final thought…

You may notice that these three secrets to sales negotiations build upon one another. If you understand the situation and control the exchange of value, you’ll be better able to keep your calm. Understanding and calm allow you to control who gets what. Calm and control give you more insight into sales negotiations and thus a better understanding to apply to latter negotiations. Develop your ability in all three equally, and you’ll win far more sales negotiations than you lose.