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To identify the keys to executing profitable sales negotiations based on analysis of the negotiation approaches of high‐performing salespeople.

BayGroup International (a leading global sales consultancy) conducted a research study involving 2,000 salespeople at all levels from Fortune 500 companies across a wide range of industries. Respondents participated in an actual buy‐sell negotiation. BayGroup collected and analyzed data on the negotiation approaches taken by study participants, and determined how the approaches taken by the sales professionals who negotiated the best agreements differed from others in the study.

BayGroup concluded that high performers raise their customers’ perception of value by using six fundamental strategies, summarized in the form of principles of sales negotiation. The paper not only describes the principles, but also reveals the unique, counterintuitive manner in which high‐performing salespeople plan and execute profitable sales strategy.

Owing to increasing pressure to improve earnings (and share prices), value‐based sales negotiation has become more critical than ever to corporate success. Use of the research conclusions and analysis from this article can provide useful guidance to sales professionals and their managers on how to execute more profitable customer agreements throughout the sales process.

The importance of “selling value, not price” has been fully embraced by the world's leading sales organizations, but effective approaches to implementing behavioral change in this area have been rare. This paper presents provocative findings that suggest new ways to approach this critical strategic challenge.

The purpose of this study is to refine theory of negotiation by empirically investigating the extent to which national-, societal- and individual-level cultures relate to negotiators' tendency to endorse questionable negotiation tactics.

To assess the hypothesized relationships between culture and ethically questionable negotiation tactics at three cultural levels of analysis, the authors collected data from Turks who reside in Turkey and in Germany and from Greeks who reside in Greece and in Cyprus. Respondents' national-level cultural values were inferred from their nationality, respondents' societal-level cultural values were inferred from their country of residency, and respondents' individual-level cultural values were inferred from their discrete and unique individuality.

At the national level, the authors found that Turks in Turkey and Germany scored significantly higher than Greeks in Greece and Cyprus on the endorsement of pretending negotiation tactics. At the societal level, the authors found that Turkish negotiators in Germany displayed higher levels of lying negotiation tactics and lower levels of pretending negotiation tactics than Turkish negotiators in Turkey. Greek negotiators in Greece endorsed deceiving and lying tactics more than Greek negotiators in Cyprus. At the individual level, the authors found that negotiators who score high on vertical individualism and collectivism endorse questionable negotiation tactics significantly more than negotiators who score high on horizontal individualism and collectivism.

The authors empirically demonstrate how national-, societal- and individual-level cultures differentially influence negotiators' tendency to endorse questionable negotiation tactics. The study's trilevel analysis allows for integrating the societal-level theories of negotiators' acculturation and cultural adjustment to a host culture, highlighting the importance of bicultural identity.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new agent-based simulation model of bilateral negotiation based on a synthesis of established theories and empirical studies of negotiation research. The central units of the model are negotiators who pursue goals, have attributes (trust, assertiveness, cooperativeness, creativity, time, etc.) and perform actions (proposing and accepting offers, exchanging information, creating value, etc).

Methodologically, the model follows the agent-based approach to modeling. This approach is chosen because negotiations can be described as complex, non-linear systems involving autonomous agents (i.e. the negotiators), who interact with each other, pursue goals and perform actions aimed at achieving their goals.

This paper illustrates how the model can simulate experiments involving variables such as negotiation strategy, creativity, reservation value or time in negotiation. An example simulation is presented which investigates the main and interaction effects of negotiators’ reservation value and their time available for a negotiation. A software implementation of the model is freely accessible at https://tinyurl.com/y7oj6jo8.

The model, as developed at this point, provides the basis for future research projects. One project could address the representation of emotions and their impact on the process and outcome of negotiations. Another project could extend the model by allowing negotiators to convey false information (i.e. to bluff). Yet another project could be aimed at refining the routines used for making and accepting offers with a view to allow parties to reach partial settlements during a negotiation.

Due to its broad scope and wide applicability, the model can be used by practitioners and researchers alike. As a decision-support system, the model allows users to simulate negotiation situations and estimate the likelihood of negotiation outcomes. As a research platform, it can generate simulation data in a cost- and time-effective way, allowing researchers to simulate complex, large-N studies at no cost or time.

The model presented in this paper synthesizes in a novel way a comprehensive range of concepts and theories of current negotiation research. It complements other computational models, in that it can simulate a more diverse range of negotiation strategies (distributive, integrative and compromise) and is applicable to a greater variety of negotiation scenarios.

The authors use laboratory experiments to test two self-assessment tax mechanisms for facilitating land assembly. One mechanism is incentive compatible with a complex tax function, while the other uses a flat tax rate to mitigate implementation concerns. Sellers publicly declare a price for their land. Overstating its true value is penalized by using the declared price to assess a property tax; understating its value is penalized by allowing developers to buy the property at the declared price. The authors find that both mechanisms increase the rate of land assembly and gains from trade relative to a control in which sellers’ price declarations have no effect on their taxes. However, these effects are statistically insignificant or transitory. The assembly rates in our self-assessment treatments are markedly higher than those of prior experimental studies in which the buyer faces bargaining frictions, such as costly delay or capital constraints.

As a departure from past research on emotional intelligence (EI), which generally examines the influence of an individual's level of EI on that individual's consequences, we examined relationships between the emotional intelligence (EI) of both members of dyads involved in a negotiation in order to explain objective and subjective outcomes. As expected, individuals high in EI reported a more positive experience. However, surprisingly, such individuals also achieved significantly lower objective scores than their counterparts. By contrast, having a partner high in EI predicted greater objective gain, and a more positive negotiating experience. Thus, high EI individuals appeared to benefit in affective terms, but appeared to create objective value that they were less able to claim. We discuss the tension between creating and claiming value, and implications for emotion in organizations.

Purpose – Although extensive research shows that power affects negotiator performance, few efforts have been made to investigate how status conflict among negotiators affects negotiation. This chapter addresses this limitation and explores the question that when groups experience status conflict while simultaneously conducting negotiations, how this status conflict affects negotiator behavior and negotiation outcome.

Approach – We define three basic forms of status contest and develop 12 propositions about the impact of status conflict on between-group negotiator behavior and negotiation outcome.

Findings – We propose that when negotiating with an outgroup, negotiators who experience within-group status conflict will use the outgroup to increase their status within group by demonstrating their value to their own group. In the situation of wholly within-group status conflict and within-group negotiation, individual negotiators will use group concern to gain status. This group concern leads to more value-creating behaviors, but lessens the likelihood of reaching an agreement. When groups experience intergroup status conflict alongside intergroup negotiation, the likelihood of agreement, and the likelihood of integrative agreement, decreases and this is due to an increase in contentiousness.

Value – This chapter suggests that status conflict is an important, albeit neglected, aspect of negotiation and it can affect the outcome of the negotiation. Greater research attention toward status conflict in negotiation should help to improve negotiation effectiveness and the quality of agreements.

Historically, a transactional perspective has dominated the business negotiation literature. This perspective includes the notions that business negotiations are a linear process that follows episodic or stage models, business negotiations are geared toward an outcome in the form of a one-time transaction, business negotiations focus on a single negotiator or negotiation in a dyad and the research has historically viewed negotiation as a “zero-sum” game. Inspired by a long tradition of empirical studies of business relationships, there is good reason to apply a conceptual analysis to challenge these four assumptions and propose an alternative view on the negotiation process. The purpose of this paper is to contrast how aspects of business negotiations are commonly conceptualized with the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) perspective and develop propositions that will contribute to future research by offering guidelines for the development of business negotiation literature.

To contribute to a discussion on the relation between conceptualization and research results, definitions within the existing literature regarding business negotiation are contrasted with similar definitions of concepts from the IMP perspective.

Four propositions have been formulated that further the conceptual understanding of business negotiation. Moreover, a need for future methodological deliberations is demonstrated, and suggestions for future research in the field are offered.

Introducing a relational perspective into the conceptually rather underdeveloped stream of research would help to develop the existing critique within the business negotiation literature of its transactional, linear and dyadic focus.

The practice briefing aims to provide real estate professionals and negotiators with a superior understanding of negotiation process design to maximise real estate disposition outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the aforementioned objective.

This is an expert opinion piece that merges the practical anecdotal knowledge from a real estate expert and a professional negotiator. This opinion piece results from the identification of an underappreciated pattern that the two experts uncovered while discussing several real estate disposition cases, namely the importance of designing a negotiation process to maximize the positive impact of real estate disposition strategies.

Proactively crafting a negotiation process and matching the same to leverage the chosen real estate disposition strategy, instead of relying on a standard negotiation approach across the board, enhances the odds of negotiating superior outcomes.

In this practice briefing, real estate professionals and even negotiators of other assets can become more aware of the plurality of value drivers, consider the most attractive potential buyers, then use these two variables to craft the optimum disposition strategy for their asset, as well as match a negotiation process out of four main possibilities: 1-to-1, 1-to-few, closed-to-many and open-to-many.

The originality comes from demonstrating based on the authors' expert opinion how negotiation process is an important variable in real estate transactions, and how the parties can shape the negotiation process to their conditions, variables and preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how negotiators’ self-evaluated emotion perception is related to value claiming under two incentive schemes. Adopting an ability-motivation interaction perspective, the authors hypothesize that the relationship will be stronger in the contingent (upon value-claiming performance) versus fixed (non-contingent upon value-claiming performance) pay condition.

Multi-level analysis of data (120 participants, 60 dyads) from a laboratory study provided evidence supporting the hypothesis proposed in this paper.

Emotional perception was indeed more strongly related to value claiming in the contingent pay condition than in the fixed pay condition. Negotiators’ emotion perception also had a direct, positive linkage with relationship satisfaction, regardless of the incentive scheme.

The limitations of the current paper include self-report measures of emotion perception, a US student sample and a focus on value claiming as the instrumental outcome. The authors urge future research to address these limitations in replicating and extending the current findings.

The present paper is the first to explicitly test the moderating role of incentive schemes on the linkage between negotiators’ emotion perception and performance. The findings not only show the context-dependent predictive value of negotiators’ emotion perception but also shed light on both negotiation and emotional intelligence (EI) research.

This study aims to investigate how and to what extent structural network properties affect dyadic negotiation behavior in tourism destination ecosystems. Specifically, this study addresses negotiation behavior in terms of problem-solving and contending, because these two key strategies reflect the integrative and distributive aspects of dyadic interactions.

This study relies on network data and dyadic survey data from nine mountain tourism destinations in Southeastern Norway. The structural network properties the authors research are triadic closure – the extent to which a dyad has common ties to other actors – and structural equivalence – the similarities in networking patterns that capture firms’ competition for similar resources. In addition, the authors also study a possible effect of relationship duration on negotiation behavior.

Triadic closure and relationship duration have positive effects on problem-solving, and structural equivalence tends to decrease problem-solving, although the effect is inconsistent; none of these three independent variables was found to affect contending negotiation behavior.

This study shows that a dyad’s structural network embeddedness has implications for negotiation behavior. Further research is encouraged to develop this theoretical perspective.

This study is a pioneering investigation of how structural network properties affect dyadic negotiation behavior in ongoing coproducing relationships in real-world destination ecosystems.