Commercial negotiation: trade priorities rather than discounts?
In high-value-added selling, securing a signature does not necessarily mean finding an agreement that serves both parties well. The management question is specific: before authorising a discount, should managers ask the salesperson to establish which elements of the offer matter differently to the customer and to their own company?
What the literature establishes
Leigh Thompson and Dennis Hrebec (1996, Psychological Bulletin) examine lose–lose agreements: negotiated decisions can leave compatible interests unexploited. Negotiators do not always recognise that some of their preferences align. A signature alone therefore does not establish that the possibilities for agreement have been properly explored.
The fixed-pie mechanism
Carsten K. W. De Dreu, Sander L. Koole and Wolfgang Steinel (2000, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) study the tendency to assume that one party’s gain must be the other’s loss. Their experiments show that motivation to process information carefully can help negotiators revise this assumption and develop integrative agreements. The relevant mechanism is not simply goodwill: it is the examination of information that makes it possible to distinguish the parties’ respective priorities.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that simply adding dimensions to an offer will produce a win–win agreement. Yet the parties must value those dimensions differently: a deadline, a volume commitment or a service arrangement does not automatically provide something useful to trade. A concession presented as inexpensive may also shift a real burden onto the teams responsible for delivery. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to promise
These studies concern negotiation and draw largely on experimental settings; they do not demonstrate a direct effect on the margins of companies in Lugano. Nor do they justify assuming that customers will reveal their priorities or that salespeople have the authority to modify an offer. In practice, an explicitly confirmed preference must therefore be distinguished from a salesperson’s hypothesis and a non-negotiable condition.
A practical check in Lugano
Within SHR’s « Vente à forte valeur ajoutée » programme, one exercise is to record, before any request for a discount, a customer-confirmed priority and an acceptable reciprocal commitment for the supplier, using an Italian-language form when Italian is the working language. In Lugano, possible dimensions include the rollout schedule for a banking service, delivery windows in fashion, trading volumes or service arrangements for an Italian-speaking family SME, without assuming that these are negotiable. Over a period defined in advance, measure the proportion of discount requests supported by a documented trade-off between priorities that the relevant team has confirmed is feasible; a proposal not confirmed by the customer does not count. This indicator checks negotiation discipline, not a margin improvement: the latter must be assessed separately, including the cost of the reciprocal commitments. To go further: explore the High-Value Selling training in Lugano in the canton of Ticino, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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