The willingness not to make the sale.

Just about any negotiating expert will tell you that the person most willing to walk away without a deal has the most power. Unfortunately, in a seller prospect situation, rather than two equals negotiating a deal, the seller is replaceable. So the buyer is almost always the one most willing to walk away and you can't truthfully trump that, but you can be okay with walking away.

Two keys:

1. You have to have enough flow of good prospects coming to you that you honestly feel, “Hey, there's a bus coming just around the corner.”
2. You have to know that a client or customer obtained through too much compromise is bound to become a problem later.

At some point, you have to say to yourself, “Let my competitor have 'em. They deserve each other.” You cannot have to or want to close the sale at any price under any terms. If that's your actual or mental and emotional position, you're soon gonna be walking around with bloody stumps. My preference is to negotiate, to try and make the deal, but not to negotiate to beat competition. I know I'm starting to sound redundant, but this brings us back to positioning. If your prospect has come to you predisposed to do business with you, then negotiation really becomes teamwork. You both want the deal to happen. He has certain limitations. You have certain minimums and requirements. Negotiation is finding a way to satisfy each other.

That is a much more manageable kind of negotiated sale than one where you are a competitive bidder or competitive presenter, where the prospect can play one against the other, you can't tell if you're being told the truth about the others and you are obviously easily replaceable. That's a very unpleasant selling environment and if that's the kind of environment you work in now if I were you, my priority would be to change it one of three ways.

• Change the way you attract prospects
• Change the entire game from apples to apples to apples to oranges
• Find a new company to sell for in a different industry