This week on The Digital Download, we are dissecting the art and science of sales negotiation, a skill most professionals think they understand but few have truly mastered. We are exploring a powerful and fresh approach with our special guest, Patrick Tinney. As the creator of the Sales-Gorilla™ negotiation methodology and a seasoned sales leader, Patrick is dedicated to helping sales professionals achieve top-tier results.

Many negotiation strategies fail to prepare sellers for the complex tactics used by modern buyers. Patrick will reveal how buyers now use "Negotiation Strategy Stacking"—combining multiple strategies to create a super strategy designed to confuse sellers and force concessions. He will introduce a more effective framework for slowing down, unbundling these complex plays, and avoiding the trap of immediate price discounting.

Join us as we discuss questions like:

• Why do the majority of business people misunderstand what negotiation really is?

• What is "Negotiation Strategy Stacking" and why must sellers be more alert to it?

• How can sellers slow down the deal to unbundle and counter these complex buyer tactics?

• What is the single biggest mistake salespeople make when faced with a "super strategy"?

• How can sellers use a similar stacking exercise to slow or stop price discounting?

With a career spanning four decades in senior sales roles and a lifetime deal book valued between $350 and $400 million , Patrick has honed his expertise in the trenches of complex B2B sales against sophisticated, market-making companies. His work, including authoring four globally distributed sales and negotiation books, is focused on providing salespeople with the practical tools they need to navigate high-stakes negotiations. This episode will equip you with a new perspective for deconstructing complex strategies and ensuring you are not the one leaving value on the table.

We strive to make The Digital Download an interactive experience. Bring your questions. Bring your insights. Audience participation is keenly encouraged!

This week we were joined by our Special Guest

• Patrick Tinney, the creator of the Sales-Gorilla™ negotiation methodology and a seasoned sales leader

This week's Host was -

• Bertrand Godillot, Founder and Managing Partner of Odysseus & Co, a proud DLA Ignite partner

Panelists included -

• Tim Hughes, CEO & Co-founder of DLA Ignite,

• Adam Gray, Co-founder of a DLA Ignite

• Tracy Borreson, Founder and CEO of TLB Coaching & Events, a proud partner of DLA Ignite

• Richard Jones, Director of Qure 8 Ltd

Transcript of The Digital Download 2025-09-26

Bertrand Godillot [00:00:08]:

Good afternoon, good morning and good day wherever you may be joining us from. Welcome to another edition of the Digital Download, the longest running weekly business Talk show on LinkedIn Live, now globally syndicated on TuneIn radio through IBGR, the world's number one business talk news and strategy radio network. Today on the Digital Download, we're dissecting the art and science of sales negotiation. A skill most professionals think they understand, but few have truly mastered. We have a special guest, Patrick Tini to help us with the discussion. As the creator of the sales guerrilla negotiation methodology and a seasoned sales leader, Patrick is dedicated to helping sales professionals achieve top tier results.

Bertrand Godillot [00:01:04]:

But before we bring Patrick on, sorry. Let's go around the set and introduce everyone. We have a full house today. While we are doing that, why don't you in the audience reach out to a friend, pick them and have them join us. We strive to make the Digital Download an interactive experience. Experience and audience participation is highly encouraged. Tim, would you like to kick us off please?

Tim Hughes [00:01:29]:

Yes, thank you. I don't know why I always find the introduction in a different language to English funny and I'm not sure why. I'm not sure why it is. And we do it week after week and a week and I still laugh. Anyway, my name is Tim Hughes. I'm the CEO and co founder DLA Ignite. Always love a good chat on a Friday on the Digital Download and I'm famous for writing the book Social Selling techniques to influence buyers and change makers.

Bertrand Godillot [00:01:59]:

Thank you Tim. Tracy.

Tracy Borreson [00:02:01]:

Oh, hello everybody and good morning bright and early where I am running in here today. I'm Tracy Borreson, founder of TLV Coaching and Events, a very proud partner of DLA Ignite and I bring the marketing hat and I love to bring a marketing hat to a sales conversation. So I'm super excited to do that.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:21]:

Today and we're glad to have you with us today. Adam.

Adam Gray [00:02:26]:

Hi everybody, I'm Adam Gray. I'm co founder of DLA Ignite, his business partner and I'm very much looking forward to this because negotiation is one of those things about which I know almost nothing. Clearly it won't stop me from having a strong opinion about things as is my want. But, but I'm. I'm definitely the student today and looking.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:46]:

Forward to this and I know that you're going to be an excellent student. So Rich Richard, good afternoon.

Richard Jones [00:02:55]:

Richard Jones from Curate. I'm a sales veteran but a social selling apprentice. Very much looking forward to this afternoon. I'm hoping to pick up a Few hints and tips on how to negotiate with my wife and my kids and my young granddaughter.

Bertrand Godillot [00:03:13]:

And I'm sure you'll get plenty of tips from our guest today. So, as I said, this week on the digital download, we'll speak with Patrick. Many negotiation strategies fail to prepare sellers for the complex tactics used by modern buyers. Patrick will introduce a more effective framework for slowing down, unbundling this complex place and avoiding the trap of immediate press.

Bertrand Godillot [00:03:42]:

Discount. Price. Discounting.

Bertrand Godillot [00:03:47]:

Let's bring him on. Good morning to you and welcome.

Patrick Tinney [00:04:10]:

Yes. Now I break it back into my other language. It's a Canadiana. Nice to see you all. What a thrill. Oh, and have another canuck on the show. Gotta love that.

Bertrand Godillot [00:04:30]:

All right, Patrick, so let's get started by having you tell us a little bit more about you, your background, and what led you where you are today.

Patrick Tinney [00:04:41]:

Well, just in the whole area of negotiation, just for fun, I'm gonna. I want to take you back a long way in the Wayback Machine. I was mentioning to Bertrand last night. We were talking. I just had a really unusual childhood. I was born into bankruptcy. I lost my dad when I was age nine. He.

Patrick Tinney [00:05:03]:

He paid everybody back on a very large construction project he was involved in and in a small town, and then he passed away. And my mom had a grade nine education, and she pulled me aside one day and she said, son, I don't think I can get you much further than grade 10. So at age 16, you will then have to leave the house and go work at the factory and start your life. As a little kid, I look up and went, whoa, that's a little heavy first thing in the morning, Mom. So, honestly, I would do anything to make money. And as a kid, I was a scrounger. I was one of those people that, you know, just went up and got it done. Now, what this forced me to do is to talk to a lot of older people and knock on hundreds of doors.

Patrick Tinney [00:05:54]:

So in the wintertime, I would shovel snow. And for me, 400 door knocks meant that I would probably get eight jobs because my no ratio was 98%. I know. It's. It was very high. This then took me into, you know, things like selling the yearbook for my high school. And then I got involved with the Hamilton Spectator daily newspaper. And I walked in and I went, oh, my God.

Patrick Tinney [00:06:23]:

This is me. I belong here. Right? And so I went back to my high school. And here's a funny story that I don't tell too many people, but I walked in the guidance Office. And I said, I want out of every science, every history, every geography, every, every everything. And I want to be put in every business class in this school. But they said, Pat, you'll be, you might be the only male in the room. I said, I know, but I gotta do this.

Patrick Tinney [00:06:50]:

And I'm sure the principal of my high school because we had a big one, 1500 kids, right. He must have just about passed out because nobody done that before. And so that vaulted me in a very clear direction into the business world. Like there's no way I wasn't going to end up there. And I got involved with music Adam and I were talking about a little while ago. I worked for Yamaha for five years. They wanted me to come sell for them. In the end, I chose advertising.

Patrick Tinney [00:07:23]:

And the school that I graduated from was 20 miles away from where I lived in Hamilton. But I was broke at the time, So I hitchhiked 12,800 miles over two years to finish the program. Wow. Yeah, it's really weird. So that led me into about 20 moves back and forth across Canada. And by age 24, I was working for the Toronto Star. And I was one of the youngest senior reps there. As a matter of fact, I was hired twice before I even sat in the seat.

Patrick Tinney [00:07:54]:

I don't know how well I interviewed, but it must have been something. And after about four and a half years of that, I joined Southam as again, one of the very youngest that they'd ever hired. And my portfolio, I think at the time time was around $35 million and I was 29 years old. So it. I never wanted to be management. I know that sounds like the weirdest thing in the world. I just love selling, I love customer engagements. And the more complex they were, the more interesting they became to me.

Patrick Tinney [00:08:26]:

And finally I was forced into management because I was making way too much money in my bonuses and they wanted to exercise the rest of me. And so I ended up taking over the insert distribution portfolio at Seldom, which when I inherited it was around 40 million and nobody knew about it. And by the time I was finished, it was worth 115 million being featured on Wall street and Bay street in Toronto. And I was retired at 50. Okay.

Bertrand Godillot [00:09:00]:

So obviously your background in negotiation.

Patrick Tinney [00:09:05]:

Oh yeah, it was non stop Bertrand. I mean, and the thing is, I didn't know how different my style was than everybody else's. What I did understand was that I wanted to spend as much time with the executive team as I could. So I would drag my boss out on calls who was A former president for Simmons Bedding Mattresses. Stan Short was his boss, and he was a senior vice president for Eaton's Simpsons. These people had pedigrees that were just stunning. And so to go and be involved in senior meetings with these people allowed me to watch people underreact to some of the most obtuse approaches from customers.

Bertrand Godillot [00:10:01]:

All right, so, Patrick, let's get started with a foundational question, as we. As we always do. So why do the majority of business people misunderstand what negotiation really is?

Patrick Tinney [00:10:17]:

Yeah, you know, I really mulled this for a long time. I think what ends up happening is that we take negotiation and we compress it into one word when it is actually one piece of about four pieces. So haggling is not negotiating. Bartering is a different game altogether. Mediation is a different discussion altogether, and it sometimes gets lumped in with negotiation. Arbitration is really a. Almost like a government style of facility and professional sales negotiation is what it is. Further to the right, you've got crisis negotiation, which has no bearing on sales, but somehow is being pushed into the sales circle and I think confusing the hell out of everybody.

Patrick Tinney [00:11:09]:

And then you've got diplomatic negotiations. So we use this word like, if you follow your. You know, what we do here on LinkedIn, and if you want, just listen to your television feed. Every other word is negotiation, but I think everybody's interpretation of it is totally different. And I'm just kind of sitting there going, wait a minute, folks, we got to clean this up. We got to clean this up. Because what's happening with. So the academic world uses case management to develop their thesis on what works.

Patrick Tinney [00:11:45]:

They don't necessarily have had to been the person in the room doing the deal, as a matter of fact, and I won't identify the person, but I've had a person who's taught negotiation all over the world at the academic level and at the elite level call me up and say, pat, I'm stuck in New York City. I got this problem. What do I do? And so, you know, I did help the gentleman out. The other part of it is the crisis style that we've been introduced to through Chris Voss and some others. It's very tactical. Now, a tactic is something that a buyer can use. The only time a tactic can be used by a seller is if they own their sales vertical, like Apple, like Nvidia. Right now, Nvidia can't make their product fast enough.

Patrick Tinney [00:12:33]:

Oracle, and you gentlemen are Oracle royalty. Their forward PE is based on the backlog of their book. So they're not even projecting out. They're saying, I hope we can fill the backlog. So those are really kind of the only conditions where you're able to be tactical on the sales side. I was pointing out to Bertrand yesterday that even Microsoft has a commoditized portion of their business. If I sit and stare at any business for any period of time, I will find commoditization. And this is how selling an ecosystem, if you have one, is beautiful.

Patrick Tinney [00:13:17]:

Because then what you're doing is you're kind of neutralizing the potential for commoditization, because rather than getting into dollars, what you do is you repackage and rebundle value and hidden value and value that may happen down the road.

Adam Gray [00:13:35]:

It's really interesting that you talk about the different types of in quotes, negotiation. And I guess for me, what I would like to understand, because I'm sure that mediation and sales negotiation and crisis negotiation and bartering are all wildly different things. And I certainly know when I have negotiated things, sometimes I'm successful and sometimes I'm not. And I put the successes down to me being a brilliant negotiator, and I put the failures down to the client being awkward. So what are the overarching kind of fundamentals of a successful negotiation? How do I make this as attractive for all parties as possible? What are the things that I need to know as that kind of foundation?

Patrick Tinney [00:14:30]:

So what we're trying to do in a really, really, really sharp negation negotiation, and this is a philosophy that I built, and I was the first one to do it anywhere that I can find, I decided that most companies that I ran into didn't actually have a philosophy. What they have was a culture. And I said, so if the philosophy is going to be something like Maslow's approach, what would it be? Well, the bottom piece is to take away all the negative risk you can. We're going to talk a lot about risk today. We're going to replace that next level up with as much positive risk as we can introduce. The third layer up is. Is while all of this movement is going on, we're not letting the relationship warp. In other words, we're keeping it in a beautiful state of stasis, calmness, peace.

Patrick Tinney [00:15:20]:

And then finally, based on our cost modeling, based on our futures, based on a whole plethora of things that are important to the client and our company, we come out with a deal. And deals are almost never perfect. But you know, when you've made a good deal, Adam, when you walk away and you feel great peace, if you don't feel great. Peace. Watch out.

Tracy Borreson [00:15:53]:

So, Patrick, I have a question because you were talking about how tactics. So if we're looking at this kind of pyramid of negotiation needs and. But we're not going to get into, like, tactics. How do we, like, package all of these things into a conversation or into a series of conversations so that we can.

Patrick Tinney [00:16:19]:

Yeah.

Tracy Borreson [00:16:20]:

And move in the right direction.

Patrick Tinney [00:16:22]:

Yeah. So as a marketer, you're forced to buy things. Right. Then you can be tactical. You can do anything you want. You can stand on your head and stick nickels. I mean, you can do anything you want. You come in with dancing poodles.

Patrick Tinney [00:16:39]:

You can do the flinch. You can person gives you the price. You go, when I see people do it, I say, did you just flinch? Because that's what I thought I saw.

Tracy Borreson [00:16:55]:

Oh, just hold on. Let me make it more dramatic.

Patrick Tinney [00:16:57]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let one of your hair extensions fall off and then wrap around your forehead. Yeah, it's. Those are the types of things we can't do. It's like lowering your voice to create drama. Take it to Broadway. Who cares? You know, looking at a person saying, you're an analytic and I understand you. Well, analytics have different kinds of motivations.

Patrick Tinney [00:17:31]:

If I could offer something that's really, really, really important in all of this, if you can understand what motivates the person that you're dealing with, then you're off to a terrific start. Because got to remember, if you're dealing with a buyer, they get paid on lowering your prices for extracting value that other people can't see. Right. So storage right Now, Bertrand and I were talking last night about storage. Cloud is actually a commodity now. Now, 10 years ago, cloud was a dream. Maybe it was a little bit longer than that. But I bought a gig of Cloud for $29 US that's why I operate gorilla on.

Patrick Tinney [00:18:18]:

So the strategic side. Okay, so this is a piece that you want to chew on in the back of my book. Unlocking. Yes, the revised edition. It's this one here.

Tim Hughes [00:18:27]:

You need to get the revised edition.

Patrick Tinney [00:18:29]:

Yeah, it's the one with the gold sticker on. It's received on Amazon about. I think it's just under 60 reviews. Most of them are five star and some by academics. As a matter of fact, the Columbia School of Business, Stern School of Business, was the first to recognize it, which shocked me with strategy. You have to. You have to in the back of the book. So what I've done is I've created a book.

Patrick Tinney [00:19:01]:

It took seven years to finish the creation of the book. But what I did was I took the most complex concepts in the world of negotiation and broke them down into grade 11 language. Because I understand that because I worked in the newspaper business, I know exactly what it is. Like. Like when I use the word obtuse, you. You look at it. It's a word that probably doesn't fit in my book. Right.

Patrick Tinney [00:19:28]:

For the reason that I know that probably two thirds of the world, English isn't their first language. Right. So you have to make everything quite approachable. In the back of the book, there are 25 negotiation strategies that primarily buyers use. And so what I do is I've laid out risk positive, risk negative, risk, time compression time, decompression, navigation, and then sort of final management solutions for each one. So I give you a real playbook on how to understand how to deal with aggressive personalities, passive personalities, personalities that are. So there are some people out there that believe that there are only three negotiation personalities. I hope these people get regular weekend passes because they're going to need them.

Patrick Tinney [00:20:22]:

And then there is people like Marcus Buckingham, if you've read his book, who believes there's. There could be 28 or maybe 30 or 40 different personality types. I believe in the negotiation world, there's about seven. And then when you start to crisscross them, that could make that wider. Right. Because we don't have one specific negotiation personality. We have a personality that changes to acclimate to our negotiation partner.

Bertrand Godillot [00:20:54]:

So, Patrick, you talked about walking away in peace. Does that mean that you have managed to get a fair deal?

Patrick Tinney [00:21:06]:

Yeah, you brought up that word, fair, and I love that word. I shared a really interesting story with Bertrand yesterday, the word fairness. I really want you to. I want, if you've ever seen, remember the old spider man comics, I want your spidey tingles to go straight up in the air like that when somebody says, I'm not sure how fair that is. Okay, so do we have a definitive scale for what fairness actually means to everybody? And the answer is, no, we don't. And under pressure, people will lean on that scale. So you might be dealing with somebody who's a really calm, laid back individual who just went into his boss's office and she ripped his face off for not getting the kind of deal that she wanted. And then all of a sudden, you know, you get, you know, an otherwise calm person come in and go nuclear.

Patrick Tinney [00:22:03]:

And I've had it happen to me. And the thing to do when this happens is let them finish. Don't say word, just stare at them honestly, because otherwise you become invested emotionally and you have to detach. Is, this is so important, detaching your, your own emotions. So winning and losing should feel exactly the same thing in a negotiation. That way you don't become too emotionally invested to the point where you got to have a deal. And you know, and this is what happens when people travel to other countries. There's a lot of pressure.

Patrick Tinney [00:22:45]:

Like a large deal for me was $13 million and that was back in the mid-1990s. What would that be today? 100 million, 150 million? I was looking at 150 jobs if I got that deal wrong. That's a lot of pressure. And I have had times where I had to make decisions about deals where I knew that 90% of the group that I represented and I represented 125 newspapers at one point we're going to be happy. The other 10% we're going to scream to the rafters. And so I would just have to let them scream because better that the deal represent the ethos of the company and not cause price contagion, keep us profitable and keep our employees motivated to deliver what it is that we promised. The last thing you want to do is buy a product so low that when you call it and say geez, I just noticed there's something wrong. Yeah, I know, us too, good luck.

Adam Gray [00:23:54]:

But, but you, you say about not being too emotionally invested, clearly that becomes, you know, if, if I'm selling cheese sandwiches to people that's quite. You don't like the cheese sandwich? I go yeah, whatever. It's, it's $2. But as the deal becomes progressively larger and more pressure on me, you know, you said about 150 jobs relying on this deal happening or maybe I'm in a commission based sales role and this is the difference between buying a new car and taking the family on holiday or not, you know. So is it not difficult not to be emotionally invested in the outcome of the negotiation?

Patrick Tinney [00:24:37]:

I think that's a, that's a wonderful question. And I think that with the vast majority of the sales world there is that salivation that happens. You can, you can smell it. Now if you're going to be in a territory for a long period of time, as I was and as, I mean I had the second largest territory in the company, you have to think years ahead, like what damage am I doing today that I won't be able to repair years from now? Right. And my bonuses, my year end bonuses got to be so big. Senior vice president, call up After I launched a one million dollar product that was on budget and he said, put your annual bonus again. And I said, I told him he was pleased. Nice.

Patrick Tinney [00:25:29]:

But because the, the product I produced was marking up other people's paper and using our machinery to deliver it in all of our systems, the markup was 55 to 60%. So that's a half a million bucks you hadn't budgeted before. And he had to walk into the, the, the C team and say, oh by the way, there's extra half a million bucks and we got a pay tiny out.

Tim Hughes [00:26:03]:

So Bertram, Mark Carrison's comment. So Mark says understanding what motivates a buyer is like dating. They say it's about personality, but, but really it's about price, timing and whether they see themselves in a long term relationship.

Patrick Tinney [00:26:25]:

Yeah, I agree with them. You're smart.

Tim Hughes [00:26:30]:

And, and Mark also says, well, Mark's been bit of guest on here, so you know, we only have smart people on here, Pat. So Mark says the best negotiators don't win or lose. They make you feel like it was your idea to settle on a fair agreement.

Patrick Tinney [00:26:46]:

Yeah, everything but fair. Life's not fair, Mark. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm not six feet tall and that's not fair. I'm just going to have to get used to being 5 foot 9. But I'm not going to spend the rest of my life thinking, geez, just think about how tall, how taller I could have been if I'd have been six feet tall and the kind of girls I could have dated. That's not the way negotiation works. It's like the, it's.

Patrick Tinney [00:27:17]:

I was explaining to Bertrand last night, my son used to use a variation of that on me and he'd say, dad, and I only have one child. He'd say, dad, I asked for help outside with, with work and, and it was, I remember one, one time in particular was the fall and it was cold and we had to do the eavesdrops and I said, son, can you come outside and just spot the ladder and pick the gucky leaves off as they come out of the, of the gutter. He goes, dad, you're just going to ruin my whole day with this. You're going. And he'd done this before, right? And I thought, hi, you only got one child so you don't want to ruin their day. And he was already working hard. He was a chef in the kitchens when he was 15 and that's very hard work. It's grueling and they really lean on the young ones.

Patrick Tinney [00:28:04]:

And I paused for a moment and I said, son, you're right. I won't ruin your day. But if you're not outside in five minutes, I guarantee you I'm going to ruin the rest of your life. That's fairness.

Bertrand Godillot [00:28:24]:

Okay. Okay. So we know that today, Patrick, on significant transactions, you're going to have a team, actually, of people involved into making the decision. And I guess that when it comes to negotiation, that drives different reactions, different behaviors. How do you deal with that?

Patrick Tinney [00:28:58]:

Yeah. So I looked in my book and I said, you didn't put good cop, bad cop in your book, did you? I'm ashamed to say I did because I can walk into a room and I know right away, right? So here's a funny story. I had been seconded by an HR person to come in and help a safety company who was doing around three quarters of a billion dollars grow their sales through negotiation, right? So they were selling. They just weren't getting the right amount of margins. And so anyway, I sat in there and it took me almost a year to get in front of them. I did my analysis. I sent them a small bill. Well, the first thing they did was they started chirping about a small bill.

Patrick Tinney [00:29:44]:

And they had met me. What do you think I've been doing for a year? Sitting here twiddling my thumbs? So I walked in with a really nice suit on. In those days, it was a Hugo Boss. Hugo Boss tie, really dressed up nice. We're in this gigantic border, okay? And Don Mills, the guy sitting at the end of the table is. Is the president. I got the CFO on this side, and I got the vice president of the Americas. And we're on a live edge table covered in lacquer that's like 35, 40ft long in their loft, okay? So they own the top of the building, and they got a fair size salesforce, and they travel all over the world with plants in Punjab, Pakistan.

Patrick Tinney [00:30:22]:

And there was one more country. But anyway, so. So they had great markup. They just weren't using it properly, right? And so somehow my rate come up. And he says, well, you know, we. You know, we think this rate is a little bit high and we want all this free stuff and we want this and we want that, and we don't have much money. And I. And I'm kind of sitting there kind of going, this isn't exactly the way I saw this thing coming, right? And so I sat there and I said, you want a piece of me, don't you? And I.

Patrick Tinney [00:30:56]:

I just said to myself, you can buy me by the minute if you want. Then the CEO looks like Don Cole. Own says, that sounds expensive. I said, well, it's only expensive. You think about it that way, right? I said, but you want a piece of me. I can feel it. So I stripped off my tie, rolled it up in a ball, and flicked it across the table. I said, there you go.

Patrick Tinney [00:31:13]:

That's 150 bucks. You want the jacket? Next, I'll throw that across the table. And then finally this. The vice president from the America chirps up and it gets worse. And I said, you know what, guys? Can you hear that? Yeah, they said, I can hear that. I said, that table is that thick. What does it mean to you? They go, I don't know. What does it mean to you? It's not freaking ikea.

Bertrand Godillot [00:31:48]:

A few punchlines today. Yeah.

Tracy Borreson [00:31:54]:

I think this is. I think this is an interesting, like, part of the negotiation, though, right? Because I feel like there is a natural power dynamic that comes with how most people interpret negotiation. And if you're gonna go in and you've already decided that you are on the lower end of that and you're not as valuable as the table in the room, then you probably are going to end up getting pushed around, and you're probably going to leave the room not feeling at peace and not feeling that it was, quote, unquote, fair. So, like, what do we need to know about that in terms of, like, showing up?

Patrick Tinney [00:32:35]:

Oh, okay.

Tracy Borreson [00:32:36]:

Knowing our value.

Patrick Tinney [00:32:37]:

Yeah. So the way I want you to think about this going forward, my friend, is, is this a dream customer or is this a nightmare customer? Give me one good dream whale, and I will trade you six nightmares that equal exactly the same amount of money. Right? All right? So that's really important. It's also important that they telegraph to you that it's okay to be profitable. All right? So when you start feeling a lot of game theory like they were using on me, I just started saying, okay, this is what you just did, and here's the outcome. Then they would throw another strategy at me, and I'd say, okay, so this is what you just did. And. And here's the outcome.

Patrick Tinney [00:33:25]:

That's not going to work for me. And they did it again. And finally CEO looks at me, goes, okay, guys, this is going to be a tough one. This guy's sitting here analyzing us.

Tracy Borreson [00:33:36]:

But I think there's also, like, it's a good point, because people will read, like, a book that has a bunch of, like, negotiation tactics and then they bring them into a meeting, but they don't even really know. They don't know what they want. So they are just throwing tactics.

Patrick Tinney [00:33:53]:

So, so that's, that's the problem. And this is the part that I'm trying to fix right now. In the, in the negotiation community, there's a few of us that have gotten together and sort of said, all right, we've had enough. You can't make these gigantic prognostications. You can't, you know, you, you, you can't take all of the colors in, in the, in, in the, you know, in our prison of, you know, five dimensional stuff and call it great. No, that doesn't work. You know, we have to be very specific about what we say and we have to mean what we say. We have to live that moment and we over deliver in ways they never ever expected.

Patrick Tinney [00:34:37]:

The one of the most important questions I think you ask somebody when you hire somebody in sales is tell me about the worst disastrous deal you've ever been done, involved in part of creative. How did you fix it so that the customer loved you even more when it was over? Are you ready? I made an $800,000 mistake with the Hudson's Bay company, and the difference was gross and net. And I caught it. And I walk in on my management team and I said, guys, this is what I just did. And I just realized on the way back, I'm going to go outside for a walk in the snow. And if I come back looking a little tattered, you know what happened? Anyway, I walked back in and I said, I, I well out my walk. I, I asked myself two silly questions. Why am I in sales? And how do I explain this to my son 20 years down the road? I called up the day and I said, I need to meet you in the cafeteria.

Patrick Tinney [00:35:34]:

Have to discuss something with you. It's urgent. Walked in, sat down. He says, you sound a little serious. And I said, I've just uncovered an $800,000 mistake and I apologize to my company. I want to apologize to you. And I said, here's what was going to happen. We were going to bank $800,000 of your money and walk into the end of the year and give it to you rather than distribute it throughout the year.

Patrick Tinney [00:35:55]:

And he says, pat, he said, you just saved my life. I said, I don't understand. He said, what if I got stuck with a whole bunch of merchandise, right, because I didn't advertise throughout the year. And then you walk in in December with $800,000 and I've got no time left to sell it. How do you sell, how do you sell tukes in January?

Bertrand Godillot [00:36:21]:

We have a comment from Mark. Mark is. He's very talkative today and that's great.

Tracy Borreson [00:36:28]:

Our local jokester.

Bertrand Godillot [00:36:30]:

If you're going to leave money on the table for in a negotiation, call it financial dieting. It should make you feel better. Any reaction on that? I'm sure there will be a reaction on that.

Patrick Tinney [00:36:45]:

No, I, I, I actually, I like the term Mark. I, I wish you well when you do it. I was gonna say I feel like.

Tracy Borreson [00:36:54]:

Maybe more people have financial dieting habits like financial health.

Patrick Tinney [00:37:00]:

I didn't, oh no, oh no. I, I was mentioning again to Bertrand. I'm pretty sure that Tim knows the story. I walked away from Walmart in Victoria. Nobody walks away from Walmart. My company hated me. But what I was concerned about, and this is, it was before I understood strategy stacking, which I do want to talk about for a couple of minutes here. They had inadvertently done it to me, but I didn't really recognize what it was.

Patrick Tinney [00:37:27]:

But I knew it made me feel sick to my stomach. So I had a competitor out there who was priced around 20% lower than me, but my quality was much better and I knew exactly where my profitability level was. So I get the call because I had this fantastic relationship with Walmart, believe it or not. I could get a meeting with the buyer at Walmart at 7am in the morning if I want. 7am in Mississauga. And he lived in Scarborough. And so I walked in and had a chat and he says, yeah, the guys at west are offering 25. Here's this is what it looks like and what do you think? So, and he said, you know, things here, there's a lot of pressure to reduce costs.

Patrick Tinney [00:38:14]:

So whether we all understand or not, that is three strategies that have come into play. And the last piece was, are you going to give us the 25? So it works like this. We are poor, we have no money. That's not true. I've just shown you or articulated in the clearest language possible what the other side is offering. That's called share and compare. What that means is that I get to see my competitors offer in real daytime or verbally. Right.

Patrick Tinney [00:38:49]:

The last part is will you take this price? The will you take this price is a kind of anchoring where you, you, you either say yes or no. Right? So then I pulled all the evidence out to show that there was waste on the other end. And he said, pat, to be honest, he Says, we've looked at all of the components of this and we think Victoria is the correct place to start this. He was doing it for a reason and the reason is once a rate has been lowered, it then becomes the new benchmark. And my costs were different right across the country. So I said no. And I went back to my executive team and I said, by no means do you touch that price. The place went insane.

Patrick Tinney [00:39:36]:

They beat me up for three years. Honest to God, it was merciless. Three years later, new president goes into B.C. and says, did you do this deal? I said no, I wasn't involved. That was a real. He says, did you do the Walmart deal? And I said, yeah, that's me. He goes, thank God. How did you help the presence of mind? I said it was all based on cost modeling and profit and price contagion.

Bertrand Godillot [00:40:06]:

There's a good, good comment again from, from Mark. So we're, Mark is actually sitting on the, on the, on the panel today. So saying no, saying no in a deal with Walmart is like trying to tell Tornado to slow down.

Patrick Tinney [00:40:23]:

Yeah, so on that one, Mark, I, I agree with you, but it depends on the volume that you do with Walmart and that, that's all I'll really say about that. You know, companies have gone broke trying to keep Walmart happy. Walmart is now using artificial intelligence to negotiate the bottom one third of all of their SKUs and there must be like thousands of them and they're just doing it with chat bots and the program I believe was built in Estonia and Walmart bought it. So yes, you are correct. But if it's going to destroy your business, I, I think you've got to take the punishment.

Adam Gray [00:41:13]:

It's interesting that you said about, you know, resetting a lower price Mark or giving a, giving a set discount becomes the, the new, the new benchmark for stuff. And I think what's really interesting, I remember my first ever boss saying this to me about giving, giving discounts on stuff. He said, the problem is that as you said, you know, you set that up as being your standard operating terms with the people from then on. So I'm going to give you 20% off on this occasion. What they don't hear is I'm going to give you 20% off on this occasion. What they hear is I get 20% off when I buy from you. And unfortunately they don't expect a 20% cut in product or service.

Patrick Tinney [00:41:57]:

So there's, which bit of the service.

Adam Gray [00:41:59]:

Do you want to go without? If I'm Giving you.

Patrick Tinney [00:42:01]:

Yeah, yeah. So you've hit on really important salient points. So every once in a while you're going to have to do a trial to get a piece of business because it's a trophy piece of business. But there's a couple of ways of handling. Okay. One, you do come down, say the 20% you talked about and you say this is a one time offer and you put it in a, about a one paragraph contract and both parties sign it. As soon as this ends within that first trial, which could be two weeks, the price goes back to X. And if they've signed it then they, they have agreed that that's going to happen.

Patrick Tinney [00:42:45]:

Number two, the other way to do it is to go so far below the industry standard that they know you're losing money in order for them to trial your product. All right, and then part three is just over deliver even on a ridiculously priced test. That way you're living your brand. You're totally exposing all of the corner cases of your company.

Richard Jones [00:43:18]:

Do you think that sellers become too predictable? I mean there's always the sort of the end of quarter, end of year.

Tracy Borreson [00:43:26]:

Deal to be done.

Richard Jones [00:43:28]:

Buyers just hold off to the point where they know the seller is going to sort of, you know, given what they're after and maybe a little bit more.

Patrick Tinney [00:43:39]:

Yeah. So I've had a lot of these discussions. That's another great, a great comment, Richard. So sellers have a variety of different pressure points. It's either the beginning of a quarter or a month, it's the middle of the month or it's the end of the month. I know. Which means that they're doing it all day long. No, I know.

Patrick Tinney [00:44:01]:

I was, I was thinking as I said that you're really going to work me over here in a minute. Some sellers are nervous that they, they don't have permanent mojo. And so they just want to get enough deals done in their pipeline so they can relax and start to focus on getting higher profits, which won't be questioned. There are the others that get to the end of that pay period and they're just short and they, they, you know, they got mortgages to pay, they got braces to put on kids, they got food to deliver, they got grandmas that take care of all this stuff. And that's when the bad decision making happens. Because if you ask anybody who served in the military, you say one of the worst decisions made. The worst decisions made when you are tired and you are stressed, stressed, that's when the worst decisions are made. And so that can happen, but it's discipline you have to have.

Patrick Tinney [00:45:06]:

You have to develop a mindset. So when Covid started, I decided that I needed a discipline and a philosophy because the information that was floating around was just all over the place, including injecting yourself with bleach. I tried and I still come up with an orange tie. The, the truth is, I ask myself questions. Is what this person is saying to me the truth? And the second part, which is the most important part, is am I going to invest in this emotionally? That's exactly what happens in negotiation. You have to get to the truth. You have to take more time to do deals than would normally you would expect to do. If it's, if it's a deal that takes six months to negotiate, you're gonna need nine months to prepare.

Patrick Tinney [00:45:59]:

Believe it or not, the first three months are just getting ready for the first meeting. It sounds crazy, but that's the truth.

Tim Hughes [00:46:09]:

Patrick, we've had a question from our other panel member, Mark Harrison, which I'm interested in, in what you, what you say about this. And what Mark says is if you are aware that a senior manager in or in an organization was accepting gifts from a competitor during the issue period of a competitive tender process, should you contact the anti corruption department of that business to report the individual?

Patrick Tinney [00:46:38]:

Oh boy.

Adam Gray [00:46:41]:

Question.

Patrick Tinney [00:46:42]:

Yeah, you know what? I, I think it's a great question. In Canada, we've had, in our, our deeper history, we, we've had this happen and it's destroyed people's careers. It's why I approached the bay immediately with the problem. Eight hundred thousand dollar problem. So here's my philosophy on dining. And I. It's in my books. If you can eat it and you can drink it in one sitting, it's fine.

Patrick Tinney [00:47:16]:

That's it. If I can go, if I can take you up for a round of golf and that's it, that's fine. But you don't get a membership with the golf course.

Bertrand Godillot [00:47:32]:

Okay. I'd like, because we're, you know, time, time is, is running. Actually, Patrick, could we talk a little bit about strategy stacking?

Patrick Tinney [00:47:47]:

Yeah, I think it's really important. And, and thank you for that. I wanted to come back to it. Um, so when the Walmart thing happened to me, that was actually the first time it actually happened. But I didn't know what it was. All I knew was I was just feeling sick inside because I knew it was just gonna be like one of these tectonic changes. And when they happen, they have a tendency to cement themselves in. Okay.

Patrick Tinney [00:48:16]:

And Back to your previous point, I think it was, Richard. You know, like some people just get so hungry that they have to have something. There's a strategy called, I just call it the drive by. So somebody calls up and they've got a fairly sizable budget and they call you late on a Thursday or late on a Friday, which is even more vicious, and say, listen Richard, I got a quarter million bucks I got to allocate before I go away this weekend. Worst case scenario is I'm going to make the decision Monday morning. Can you get back to me as fast as you can? By the way, I'm speaking all of your competitors simultaneously, and it's nearing the end of the month. What do you do? So what, what's happening here is the buyer is exhibiting maximum pressure. Now, can you imagine starting to combine that with some other things? And I, I saw it.

Patrick Tinney [00:49:09]:

It was really weird. I kind of saw it. I forget, I, I can't remember where it's hot. And I went, my golly geez, we gotta. Sellers gotta get on this. Because what we have to do is we have to take all of components back to Is this the truth and am I going to invest emotionally? We have to take all of those strategies, pull them all apart, put them in individual buckets, and then address those strategies one at a time. And then what we have to do is go back in and figure out a way to navigate, neutralize, and then offer the kind of value that takes those what I would call game theory style negotiation patterns away. And sometimes you just have to say, here's what you've actually said to me in layman's language.

Patrick Tinney [00:50:01]:

I'd like to offer you a new Vista, and I think you're gonna love it. But the only way that you can do that is by understanding motivation. The strategies themselves, your cost modeling down to a T. You have to understand your competitors. You got to do a SWOT analysis. And with the new Gorilla product that I've launched, sales-gorilla.com you can actually go in and just put in keywords in the search, see how many videos drop down. There's 934, plus 50 podcasts, 80 hours. And you can then search through those videos and make all kinds of notes to yourself and then restack your own strategy.

Patrick Tinney [00:50:44]:

You see the problem with. When I hear people talking about all this tactical stuff, they talk about it like it's a strategy. It isn't. It is not. It's like the, it's like the person who doesn't plan forward with, with, with company strategies. And I, I, I'll often talk to CEOs and I'll say to them, okay, so what, what's your big plan for growth? What, what is it? And if they can't articulate it, I know, man, you are just treading water and eventually there's going to be a wave come in and you're going to disappear.

Tim Hughes [00:51:17]:

So, so, Pat, can I, it would, it feels like 18 months ago though it could have been 12 months ago that a friend of mine basically came to me and said, wouldn't it be great if there was like this sort of like knowledge base about negotiation? And I said, yeah, I think that would be a really good idea. And they said to me, do you.

Richard Jones [00:51:39]:

Think it, do you think people would.

Tim Hughes [00:51:41]:

Be interested if, if I took all of my knowledge about negotiation and did really short snappy videos and then put them into this knowledge base, do you think people would be interested in that? And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think they would. Anyway, this particular person then spent, I think it's about 18 months building this arc, which is that they, they basically posted on their LinkedIn profile these short snappy three four minute videos and there's what, 900 videos, 9:34.

Patrick Tinney [00:52:12]:

And there's another 150 sitting.

Tim Hughes [00:52:15]:

And, and, and, and what Pat has done is actually created this knowledge base and he's taken all of his negotiation skills and put them into these short snappy videos. And I've spent the last 18 months going, come on Pat, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. And giving him encouragement and, and, and it's, and it's now where Sales gorilla.

Patrick Tinney [00:52:41]:

What's the. So www.sales-graveilla.com and it meaning hyphen when I say dash.

Tim Hughes [00:52:51]:

Yeah, and I'm, and I'm, I'm doing the advert for Pat because I know, because he's a Canadian, you see, I know that he won't want to do that. So I'm deliberately doing the advert for him.

Patrick Tinney [00:53:02]:

I signed off on agreement with which said that I could not. So I, I've been trying to be shameful, but no, I really appreciate it. It was, it actually I worked 361 days last year. Burned out three times finishing it. I left in some of the videos where I look horrible on purpose. I deleted around 150 that weren't up to standard. And if you can find a better result resource than that on sales negotiation. And here's where it becomes important.

Patrick Tinney [00:53:36]:

It's, you're away from your office, you get the ugly call at 2:00 in the morning, you got nobody to talk to. And the customer wants a decision now. And by the way, they don't have a knock number, you're it. You know, that's, that, that, that means something.

Tim Hughes [00:53:56]:

And I mean if you go in and get the advice on the negotiation, that could mean millions of dollars for your organization and oh my God, every salesperson will know a million dollars, what that would mean in terms of commission. If I don't need to do the maths.

Patrick Tinney [00:54:14]:

Yeah, I mean like a million bucks to a medium sized business is a lot of money. I mean my lifetime deal book is just under 400 million and I stopped counting it. Age 38. That was 30 years ago. Who cares? The money was massive.

Tim Hughes [00:54:31]:

So, so I know that you were told not to come and pitch Pat, but I'm, I, I've done it for.

Patrick Tinney [00:54:37]:

You.

Tim Hughes [00:54:40]:

The last 18 months building that and, and people should give it a look.

Bertrand Godillot [00:54:45]:

Well, sorry, sorry Patrick. And because we now have a newsletter, you'll get also the opportunity to get all of the details about where you can find these resources on from, from Patrick. So Patrick, really, this has been great. Thank you so much. There's a lot of questions that we could have taken on top of that, but you know that's, that's we, we have to stop here and I, and I thank you very much on behalf.

Tim Hughes [00:55:20]:

Thanks Patrick.

Bertrand Godillot [00:55:23]:

You may visit us at DigitalDownload.Live/newsletter and anyway, we'll see you next time. Thank you very much. Thanks.

Patrick Tinney [00:55:35]:

Thank you.

Bertrand Godillot [00:55:37]:

Thank you.#SalesNegotiation #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesStrategy #SocialSelling #DigitalSelling #SocialEnablement #LinkedInLive #Podcast