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Business Strategy & Planning, Sales and Customer Management Skills, Sales Strategy

The Art of Negotiation: Tips and Strategies for Successful Business Negotiations

21 March 2023

Negotiation is an art that is essential for business success. It involves the exchange of offers, counteroffers, and concessions in order to arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement. A successful negotiation requires preparation, communication skills, and a willingness to compromise. In this blog post, we will discuss some tips and strategies for successful business negotiations.

Tips for Successful Business Negotiations

  1. Prepare thoroughly: Before entering into a negotiation, it is important to do your homework. Research the other party’s needs, interests, and goals, as well as your own. Identify your strengths and weaknesses, and determine your best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA).
  1. Build rapport: Establishing a good relationship with the other party can make negotiations smoother and more successful. Take the time to get to know them, listen actively, and show empathy.
  1. Aim for a win-win outcome: The goal of a negotiation should be to find a solution that benefits both parties. Focus on mutual interests and brainstorm creative solutions that meet both your needs.
  1. Be assertive, not aggressive: Assertiveness is a key negotiation skill that involves stating your position clearly and firmly while still being respectful of the other party. Avoid being aggressive or hostile, as this can damage the relationship and impede progress.
  1. Use active listening: Listening actively is essential to understanding the other party’s perspective and building rapport. Paraphrase their points to show you have understood and ask open-ended questions to gather more information.
  1. Don’t rush the process: Negotiations take time and require patience. Avoid the temptation to rush to a quick agreement and take the time to explore all options and alternatives.
  1. Be willing to compromise: Negotiation is a give-and-take process. Be open to making concessions and finding a middle ground that satisfies both parties.

In conclusion, successful negotiation requires preparation, communication, and a willingness to compromise. By following these tips and strategies, you can increase your chances of achieving a mutually beneficial agreement and building stronger business relationships.

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Sales & Customer Management

When Can We Say Your Startup Is Customer Obsessed?

13 December 2021

Before we get started, what’s that popular innovative company that is known for customer obsession? 

Amazon 🙂

Customer obsession is basically obsessing with the customers, that’s easy to figure right, but in reality, it means, heavily investing to know the customers more and genuinely putting effort into delighting them. 

You will wonder, isn’t everyone building for customers, why is customer obsession a thing? 

One big blunder startups commit is to overly believe in how they believe a problem should be solved without carefully understanding how customers will prefer to interact with the solutions. 

Achieving a stage of customer obsession requires a lot of customers interaction, data analysis and most importantly a lot of experimentation.

So what do we see to let us know you are customer obsessed:

  1. You are retention oriented even at the acquisition stage
    While the acquisition is very important to even validate that you have a business at all, a customer-obsessed approach is thinking beyond acquisition numbers and actually looking at the planning out journey and experience that will result in customer retention.
  2. You are thorough about each touchpoint of your customer
    As a customer-obsessed company, you literally dream of your customers. What is their challenge and how is our product or service going to help them be better. You, therefore, organize the touchpoints thoroughly to fit this. You are not afraid to iterate till it gets there!
  3. Result based over activity-based
    Send 20 emails a month or maintain 90% feedback on any amount of email sent monthly if that means sending only 2. Customer obsessed has KPIs around result as against activity. The goal is to always make adjustments that fit the customer, in fact, ‘industry standard’ isn’t the benchmark.
  4. Involving every team in the customer experience process
    Creating amazing experiences for customers isn’t only left for the customer success team, but customer-obsessed companies have all teams involved in the process of growth. Each team knows the key KPI they need to jealousy abide by to achieve customer delight.
  5. Customer Feedback
    Customer-obsessed companies understand that the most glaring product analytics data are at their best still a guess. They consciously get quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers to merge product data to real experiences to make informed decisions when updating the product, process policies, and protocol.
  6. Constantly Analysing Customer Data Routinely
    According to this article by inc.com, up to 73 percent of company data goes unused for analytics. Most startups collect customer data then sit on it and let it gather dust. Each little trend in the purchase, usage, churn, etc needs to be carefully analyzed to understand the challenges of customers, opportunities, and threats.

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