VALIDATING THE WISH LIST ESTIMATION

When I discussed the Wish List Estimation in Chapter 5, I talked about the items that are most likely to be important to your customers in any deal—length of contract, volume, price, payment terms, and service—and showed how you could estimate what the other side might want in each of these areas. But those estimates were essentially just educated guesses, so now it’s time to find out exactly how good those guesses were. It’s important to bear in mind here that although the process for validating the Consequences of No Agreement and Wish List Estimations are similar, they are not identical.

As with the CNA, the validation of your Wish List Estimation requires you to remember there’s no such thing as a generic negotiation and that you must accordingly look at each negotiation specifically in terms of the product or service being sold, who the competitors are, and who the customer is. However, unlike the CNA, for which you can get information from both public sources and other people, validating the Wish List Estimation is accomplished entirely through the latter. There are, not surprisingly, very few public sources, either in print or on the Internet, that can provide you with information on what the other side wants in any given negotiation. But you can get that information both by asking questions of people within your organization and by asking your customer directly.

Regardless of the source of this information, validating the Wish List Estimation essentially means getting good answers to three questions:

• Are these the right items?

• What is most to least important?

• How important are the top few items?

Gathering Information from Others in Your Organization

I suggested earlier that when you’re validating your customer’s CNA, you should look not just for salespeople but for people throughout your organization who have worked for or with your customer or for one of your competitors. This is because the CNA and its elements can encompass so many aspects of your customer’s business that you need to be able to call on people who know about all those aspects. Validating the Wish List Estimation, however, is, at least in a sense, less complicated, if no less important.

As already noted, both sellers and buyers in the vast majority of negotiations are primarily interested in a handful of items, including price, payment terms, service, length of contract, and volume. For that reason, to validate your customer’s Wish List Estimation, it is of primary importance that you contact people within your organization who have been specifically involved in sales—selling to your customer, buying for your customer, or selling for your most likely competitor in this deal. Once you’ve determined who these people are, the most effective way of gaining information from them is to show them the Wish List Estimation you’ve developed and ask them, based on their knowledge and experience, the answers to the three questions noted above.