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War Gaming Your Sales Negotiations

Are you constantly looking for ways to predict your buyer’s next move and calibrate your own strategy to maximize your negotiation outcome. By War Gaming your upcoming negotiation you can do just that.

A Negotiation War Game has 3 main steps:

  • Intelligence
  • Simulation
  • Debriefing

Intelligence

1. Organize your team into two teams- One “Home Team”, and one “Away Team”.

2. Collect some basic information on the actual people you will be meeting. Google your counterpart’s two most important people, have a look at their Facebook page etc. Look for information that tells you “who” they are. Please note: a War Game is an analytical way of using less data and more inferences.

The collected info. is the Away Team’s briefing material. Don’t bother collecting info. on the Home Team as this is your own people – they already know who they are.

3. Decide how many simulations you feel like doing and how long they should be. Rule of thumb – in a Sales-negotiation I would do several short simulations in rapid succession (each simulation interrupted by a strategy break). Strategy breaks are used to evaluate the progress (Teams are kept apart).

4. Get the physical lay-out right. Once the teams are set, the briefing material is done and the simulations are structured, it is important to structure your War Game.

To do a proper War Game you need access to 3 separate rooms:

Room no. 1: Have one large room in which a pre-simulation briefing will be held (briefing material will be handed out). This room will also be used for the negotiation simulation. Last but not least, this room will be used to debrief the participants.

Room no. 2: Have a smaller room in which the Home Team can prepare and evaluate proceedings in peace.

Room no. 3: Have another small room in which the Away Team can prepare and evaluate proceedings in peace.

Simulation

5. Run the simulations

As the simulations get going the Home Team will get a sense of how well their strategy is working against this specific counterpart. In the strategy breaks, the Home Team will re-group, calibrate their strategy and come back to the negotiation table.

Think about adding a feedback system if needed.

Debriefing

6. Gather your team and collect Lessons Learned, when the simulation, or rather the series of simulations are done.

At this point, you and your team will know what your actual counterpart will most likely do when confronted by your original and subsequent (increasingly calibrated) strategies – and better yet, you will have developed a tailor-made negotiation strategy.

Please note that the above mentioned method does not, in advance, prescribe to any particular strategy or tactic. A Negotiation War Game is simply an incredibly accurate, risk-free environment, in which any strategy or tactic can be tested.

So if you are doing anything before your next big Sales negotiation – it better be war gaming!

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Funding Source’s, What to Look For When On the Hunt, and How To Present

Now that you have written your business plan, have your preliminary financial data in place, you need money to make it happen.

How do you find that money? If you have saved up some, you can use that, or you can go to friends and family and get some money from them, if they support your concept and think you can do it. (F/F/P phase)

There are two other sources to go to as well, Angels or Venture Capitalist.

An Angel is a person or group that typically gives a startup up idea from $25K to as much as $1M (that much is typically an Angel Group) to begin developing the Proof of Concept or the product itself. You should go to an Angel Funding Source if you need less than $1M, and typically less than $500K, to get your product built, or if your plan requires a Proof of Concept, the Proof of Concept built.

If you go to an Angel or Angel Group you need to look at some factors before starting to talk to them. Do some research and find out:

1. What the person/group you are interested in asking money from typically invests their money in.

2. If they accept Venture Capital as a future source of funding.

3. If they are willing to add more cash down the line to help reach that “next” milestone.

4. If they have contacts with people that may be interested in providing more money should the need arise.

5. If they have contacts that may want to use your product/services.

6. How much control/hands on activity they want to have with your company. (Do they want to sit on your Board of Directors or Board of Advisors, do they have any say on how the money is spent within the company?)

7. And if you are going for a lot more money in the near future, if they work with or know any Venture Capitalist that like your industry/product type.

It is the recommendation of TDBell Enterprises, Inc., that you work with your Angel Investors as an Equity Play, meaning they get a small portion of your company for the money they invest. We do not recommend that you use the money as a loan.

A Venture Capitalist is typically a person or company that has gone to from one to many people, companies, retirement funds or other large pools of money and created a Venture Fund that is geared to one or more industries/products/services. These funds typically finance a company from $500K to over $200M, taking stock in the company as “collateral”.

Like going to the Angel Investors, you need to look at a few things when you go to a Venture Capitalist:

1. Has the person/group invested in companies in your industry?

2. At what stage of the company (Proof of Concept, Development, Revenue in place (and if so, at level of revenue is required), etc.)

3. Are they going to be Sole Investors at this stage, or are they going to have other groups joining in this round with them.

4. How involved are they going to get with your company? (Do they want to manage the company, etc?)

5. Do their portfolio companies need your product and will they introduce you to them if they do?

6. How much of the company stock do they want?

7. Will they add more funds to the company should it be needed? (And if so, at what cost to you?)

8. How much reporting do you have to do to them?

After you have looked at the available Angels that you can find, the available Venture Capitalist you can find, you need to decide which path is the best way to go for your company and your “style”.

If you are confident that you will need Venture Capital level funding, after you narrow your search down to the Venture Capitalist you are going to target, and have answered the above 8 (and a few more I’m sure) questions, you need to decide if you need to go to an Angel first.

At this point you start fine tuning your financial section to meet the needs of the Investor you are going to approach. The over all business plan stays the same through this process (unless you are fine tuning it to meet development/production needs due to feedback, etc.). The only part of the business plan that changes is the Financial Section(s) and that changes based on the target Investors. You already have in your plan the steps to go live and to go to revenue. You have your milestones written down, etc, in the plan, and you have “line items” in the financial section that correspond.

Example:

You are going to create a software/hardware intensive service product that requires FCC approval of the Concept. To create the Proof of Concept to meet the FCC needs, you need $750,000, but to go to revenue you will need roughly $35M (which includes the $750K). You are able to get a Friends/Family/Personal Pockets (F/F/P) round up of $150K.

Your research shows that the available list of Venture Capitalist out there that would fund this project require you to have your FCC permits in place, a working model of your service product in place, and 1 solid customer ready to pay for your services once you are able to build out.

In this example you would need to go to one or more Angel Investors to help you reach the remaining $600K to get your prototype up and running to do the testing that will satisfy the FCC. You would want to find an Angel or Angel Group that allows for future rounds of Venture Capitalist backed funding. This group would hopefully be willing to add a bit more in if needed to go past any “gotcha’s” that may crop up as you answer the FCC requirements.

Now that you know you are going to an Angel or Angels you rewrite your financial section to show an investment of $150K (F/F/P), the need and the use of the $600K from the Angels, and when the remain investment of $34,250,000 will be requested and how it will be used.

When you write up your presentation to the Angel(s) you show the Living business plan, current Financials, and talk to your needs.

When you get to the Venture Capitalist later you write up your presentation, you show the current business plan, which no longer has the Proof of Concept stage in it (it’s completed successfully, and not part of your plans now, living business plan remember?) but shows next stages over the next three to five years as perceived today, with the financials now showing how you spent the last $750K, and what you will be doing with the next $34,250,000 that you are asking from the Venture Capitalist.

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Using Remote Desktop Access to Make Remote Presentations

Whenever many small business owners hear about the possibility of making remote presentations, they tend to view it as something that is good, but which is beyond their means. You can’t blame them. They are mostly just being realistic, by way of appreciating the considerable cost that would go into the purchase of the equipment through which the remote presentations can be made. True, they can see the considerable cost savings they stand to make through such remote presentations (by of things like getting to avoid travel costs). But they simply can’t see where they would get the money to purchase the hardware and software required for such remote-presentations.

It is true that in the traditional way of thinking, a huge input of capital would be required for making remote presentations. The presentations may have to be made through video conferencing technology, and the hardware required for this doesn’t come cheap. And that is to say nothing of the software and bandwidth costs, though it is the initial investment element that tends to be more bothersome.

As it turns out, though, there are cheaper ways through which remote presentations can be done. One of those, and which is pretty much something that any business can afford, is the opportunity for remote presentations available through remote desktop access tools.

No extra hardware is required to make the remote desktop access possible. The only thing you may need to put some money onto is the purchase of the software which makes the whole venture possible. And such software, as it turns out, is not expensive either. In fact, inasmuch as you can afford an operating system for your office computers, it would be something you can afford with ease.

In using remote desktop access to make remote-presentations, you simply grant the people who will be ‘attending’ your presentation rights to remotely access your computer’s desktop through the specialized software that forms the backbone of the platform. Once they are logged on, and they have access to your desktop, you simply start running the presentation on your desktop, and they see it on their respective computers, as it is them who were running it! The presentations itself could be one that you will have made using a program like PowerPoint, so it is not something you are likely to incur any extra costs on. And you can add elements such as voice to it and even animations to simulate your pointing out of various elements on a project – so that it becomes as real as possible.

That is one of the ways through which you can get to cost effectively make remote presentations – right from your computer’s desktop, using remote desktop access software. The way most of that software works is such that you can give the ‘attendees’ temporary access rights to your desktop for the duration of the presentation. These are rights you go ahead to withdraw at the end of the presentation; to prevent the risk of the attendees starting rummaging through your computer after the presentation.

So, there you have: the way to cost effectively make a remote-presentation, using remote desktop access software programs.

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