In Life and Work, Everything is Negotiable
(Originally Created by Brendan Alan Barrett of StartInPhx.com)
In my last post for Possess Your Success, Don’t Let Adversity Derail Your Work, 7 Things to Remember That Will Keep Your Work on Track, I covered a lot of basics for working in teams and managing projects. Today I want to dive a little deeper into unpacking the first key idea for keeping your work on track. That key lies in the fact that everything is negotiable.
If in all my work in sales and project management the No. 1 thing I’ve learned is that everything is negotiable, then the No. 2 thing I’ve learned is that everything includes the chain of command, standard operating procedures, decision making protocols, and the limitations other people set for your work.
Compared to the one-size-fits all messages of advertising, sales uses customized messaging to match individual prospects with the exact words they need to hear to interpret the value they need and want, but might otherwise overlook.
Most B2B salespeople understand this concept and spend a lot of time attempting to circumvent a client’s formal procurement processes. Simply because those processes are typically designed to boil everything down to price.
In both B2B and B2C sales this strategy can be implemented by finding a way in which all of the decision makers – maybe a husband and wife or members of a committee – can be pitched at once, rather than pitching to just one and hoping they can convince everyone else involved in the decision to buy.
Even for the same product or service, the pitch that worked on a single decision maker might not work for the others. Each decision maker will have their own questions and concerns, but they can also have their own interpretation of spoken and written language that needs to be accounted for.
The lesson here is that accepting standard protocol, pitching to a non-decision maker or only one of many decision-makers in the case of sales, is a sure way to waste a lot of time and effort not producing the results you’re after. Like anything else, it is attention to the smallest of details that makes the biggest impact in anything we do. Yet, standard procedures rarely account for unique circumstances.
Following standard procedures can in many ways limit the progress you’re trying to make or kill it all together, but trying to break the mold isn’t that revolutionary of an idea. I can’t think of single person I admire or learned about in school who was the subject of conversation for doing the things they were expected to do, the way they were told to do it.
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Gates, Steve Jobs – these are household names because they challenged the status
quo. These leaders of society did exactly what people told them they couldn’t do. In some cases they went against what they were explicitly told not to do.
Many of these monumental figures didn’t finish school, or at least the level of schooling of their peers. Limited schooling and the standard way of doing things didn’t stop them from negotiating for the reality they had envisioned. It’s probably safe to say they didn’t all get exactly what they were after, but they certainly moved the needle in a positive direction.
It should be clear by know that negotiation isn’t something that should be reserved for use by salespeople. Negotiation is a fact of life and it should be employed whenever the current circumstance don’t meet the needs of everyone involved. That includes any time something obstructs you from accomplishing your goals.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Brendan Alan Barrett, writes about professional development at www.StartInPhx.com, a blog dedicated to the mission of career success without student-debt. Brendan is also the author of READ WRITE DO Professional Development and Career Success Playbook, a book written for people who want to jump start the career they’ve wanted for way.
