Business Negotiation as a Crucial Component of Sales

Abstract

Negotiation is a controlled communication process that resolves the conflict of interest of two or more negotiating parties (when each party can block the achievement of the objective of the other side). The key to negotiating effectively is to know how much to offer in which moment and know where and how to draw the line of what we are prepared to accept. Negotiation theory in some segments differs from the negotiation in sales. The purpose of the paper was to point out the specific potentials, problems, dynamics and importance of negotiation as a crucial component of sales. The main hypothesis of the paper is that many companies today leave negotiation function outside of standardization in the business processes. It will be clarified what are the contents of negotiating function, how it affects development and how to acquire negotiating skills best in the sales process. The aim is to draw attention to dimensions that preparation process has when leading the course of negotiations to accomplish desired sales goals. Primary research has been conducted on the sample of fifty (N=50) respondents from different Croatian companies. The findings indicate that Croatian employees are not prepared quite adequately for the process of negotiation and that they are not improving their negotiation skills.