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When sales leaders talk about negotiation problems, they usually mean one of three things:
1) price pressure emerges,
2) concessions are creeping in, and
3) deals that felt solid suddenly feel fragile.
The instinctive conclusion is that sellers need to “get better at negotiating.” That conclusion is understandable. It is also usually wrong.
In most cases, negotiation problems are not caused by weak negotiation skills. They start in earlier conversations where the problem, the consequences, and the decision itself were never fully worked through. Negotiation is rarely where deals break. It’s where earlier misses finally become visible.
By the time a deal reaches negotiation, most of the important dynamics are already set:
→ The buyer has formed an opinion about risk.
→ They have decided what matters most.
→ They have a sense of alternatives.
→ They have internal constraints they may or may not have shared.
If a seller reaches the negotiation phase without real alignment with the decision makers, it’s not because they lack tactics. It’s because that alignment wasn’t created earlier.
Negotiation doesn’t create value. It tests whether value was clear enough to withstand pressure.
Sellers often describe negotiation as the moment when buyers suddenly “push back.”
But buyers don’t push back randomly.
They push back when:
When those things are fuzzy, price becomes the easiest lever for the buyer to pull. Not because they are adversarial, but because they are still trying to decide whether this is worth doing at all.
In those situations, no amount of negotiation training will fix the underlying issue.
There's a pattern most teams overlook. Many negotiations are not negotiations at all. They are recovery efforts.
They are attempts to salvage a deal where:
By the time the seller is “negotiating,” they are often trying to reintroduce clarity that should have existed much earlier.
That’s why concessions feel one-sided. That’s why sellers feel trapped. That’s why negotiation becomes emotional instead of strategic.
When negotiation pressure appears late in the deal, many organizations respond by investing in negotiation training. It makes sense. It just rarely addresses what caused the problem in the first place.
Why? Because training works best when it reinforces the right behaviors at the right point in the process. Teaching sellers how to negotiate harder does not help if the real issue is how they qualify, diagnose, and frame decisions upstream.
You cannot negotiate your way out of weak early conversations.
Recurring negotiation problems point back to questions that should have been asked earlier, such as:
These questions don’t feel like negotiation questions. That’s the point. They are questions about decision quality, not deal mechanics.
When the market is forgiving and buyers are less cautious, teams can get away with this approach. Momentum masks gaps. When conditions tighten, tolerance disappears.
Buyers slow down. Risk sensitivity increases. Every decision gets scrutinized. In that kind of environment, weak foundations show up quickly and negotiation becomes the moment where everything unravels.
That doesn’t mean sellers suddenly forgot how to negotiate. It means the system stopped absorbing earlier mistakes.
The way out is not sharper negotiation tactics. It's a stronger consultative discipline earlier in the process. Sellers need to surface real problems, real consequences, and real decision criteria before solutions and pricing ever enter the conversation.
When negotiation becomes the hardest part of the sale, it’s usually because too much was left undecided earlier. Sellers weren’t lazy. Buyers weren’t difficult. The process simply allowed conversations to move forward without real commitment forming.
That’s the focus of our Consultative Selling Guide. It looks at how sellers create clarity with buyers, how decisions get shaped instead of rushed, and why deals that are built on understanding are far less likely to unravel later.
If negotiation keeps feeling like a recovery effort, this is where the work actually begins.
One final note: there is a place for legitimate negotiation training. If sellers have to deal with “buyer-representative consultants” and/or Procurement, there may well be a place for comprehensive negotiation training. If that is the case, be careful to understand whether sellers are in win-win vs win-lose negotiations and make that determination the starting point for considering what training to employ. The point of this blog is to alert sellers and leaders to how often the need to negotiate is often a symptom of earlier misses.
Tom Snyder is the founder of Funnel Clarity; a training and consulting company focused on humanizing sales. Tom’s passion is helping companies achieve measurable sales performance improvement. Previously, Tom spent 10 years with the sales training firm Huthwaite, culminating in the role of CEO. He later founded Business Performance Partners, a sales and strategy consulting firm that evolved into Funnel Clarity. Tom is a sought after international speaker, named IEPS' 2024 Speak of the Year and was named one of the Most Influential Sales Leaders. He has authored two McGraw Hill best sellers, “Escaping the Price Driven Sale” (2007) and “Selling in a New Market Space” (2010).
