What if closing more deals — and charging more — had less to do with pressure tactics and more to do with understanding what your customer really wants?
Negotiation isn’t just about the final conversation at the end of the sales process. In this episode, we break down how legendary negotiator Herb Cohen’s thinking can help you gain leverage much earlier in your sales cycle. By understanding customer outcomes, psychology, and the hidden drivers behind decisions, you can move from competing on price to winning on value — and create stronger, more profitable deals.
By listening to this episode, you’ll discover how to:
- Use Herb Cohen’s principles to build power earlier in your sales conversations
- Ask smarter questions that uncover what truly matters to your customers
- Create proposals that justify higher pricing while delivering better outcomes
Hit play now to learn how mastering customer understanding — not last-minute negotiation — can help you close more deals, protect your margins, and grow your business faster.
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Episode Transcript
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you will learn how Herb Cohen’s mastery of negotiation can help us close more deals quicker.
Intro:
Welcome to Sales Process Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure industry construction and trade, sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years.
Ben Wright:
In this episode, you will learn how Herb Cohen is a man we can take inspiration from to help us negotiate and close deals more effectively, how that can be done earlier in our sales cycle, and some outcomes that we can think about to help grow our businesses quickly. Herb Cohen is a man that I have followed for quite a while. He has been in the negotiation, persuasion, psychology game for decades and has a book that I have read, loved. It was called You Can Negotiate Anything. His techniques, no doubt, focus around psychology, understanding the other side, and then strategic thinking. I was going to say out thinking the other side, but it’s very much around understanding what the other side is thinking and then how we can use that to get a result from our negotiations.
When we look at his career highlights, Herb Cohen is not a man that I would expect everyone on this podcast has necessarily heard of, but he still deals north of $100 billion. He has been involved in big Fortune 500 company deals and really helped craft their negotiation strategies. He’s also been involved in diplomatic negotiations, really high stake sales negotiations, and I think in some instances, some really high stake negotiations that had nothing to do with sales, more involving people in peace and transfer of power.
He’s a man that I’ve really admired for a very simple approach that he takes to negotiation and just persuasion conversations, and that’s all around three principles being power, time, and information. So power, essentially who has the power in a deal, which can often be positional amongst other things, time, who can be the most patient or who has the least time available when it comes to getting deals done, and then information, who perhaps has access to the most and most relevant information that can also help get a deal done or can put higher or lower value on certain facets of a deal that allows it also to happen.
So without going into detail into that, I’d actually really encourage you to read Herb Cohen’s book, You Can Negotiate Anything. I really enjoyed it. It’s short, sharp, it’s punchy, exactly how I like it, and really helped me learn some nice extra areas when it comes to negotiation. But I think if we’re having a look at what we can be learning from Herb in our roles as sales leaders, for me it’s really about making sure we’re understanding what the other side needs as early as we possibly can.
I talk a little bit around, or in fact I talk a lot around asking great questions early when it comes to speaking with our customers, but where I haven’t spent much time is that when we really truly understand what our customers need, i.e. what’s the most important parts of the deal or what are the most important outcomes that they’re looking for, this really helps us build some strength in one of Herb’s three levers and that’s power. Because when we can understand what’s most important to customers, we can build a really compelling proposal, product or service, doesn’t matter, around exactly what they’re looking for. And when we can really know with precision what that customer is looking for, that allows us to do things like charge more, that allows us to do things like close more deals, and that allows us to do things like really deliver great results for our customers, which turns into great case studies, great social proof, return business, referrals, word of mouth, everything that goes with really delivering projects to customers successfully.
But if I zero in on one of these, I think it’s the ability to ask questions early in our customer engagement and then understand exactly what the customer needs, gives us the power to be able to design our solution to the exact need that they have. And yes, that is absolutely within the scope of the products and services we do, but if we can nail that, we will be able to charge more.
In my experience, plus or minus 10% for most deals is a grey area when it comes to winning and losing. Customers will generally go up and down between zero and 10% depending on the value they see in products. And where we are absolutely nailing that value proposition to our customers, it affords us to be in the plus range when it comes to price, i.e. we don’t need to match competitors’ pricing and we can charge a little bit more for delivering that great service or those great outcomes. What that means is we can hire better people, we can reinvest into our products, we can bank more profit if that’s the case.
And I always encourage businesses to bank profit responsibly because you eventually do get caught out when you’re greedy and gouge customers. I’m never ever in that camp. However, when we know what the outcomes of our customers are, that allows us to build a really compelling proposition and a really strong long-term stable cost or pricing structure.
So, the lesson for me coming out of Herb Cohen is, yes, he’s a master at negotiation. He has written a great book, You Can Negotiate Anything. He’s got three fantastic levers, power, time, and information when it comes to negotiating deals.
But the key lesson for me, for leaders, is how can you really understand what a customer wants so you can then deliver it through your quote or your proposal and then have a long-term and robust pricing strategy that helps your business stay profitable and invest in all the things you need to do to grow. Because if we get that right, if we deliver great outcomes to customers, our business will always exist and we’ll always be able to grow.
So, walking out of today, the emotion or the thoughts that should be running through your head is to think about if we are really trying to understand what a customer needs. But also, or more importantly, when we do know what a customer needs, are we actually taking the time to deliver that outcome to them as closely as we possibly can? So, we focused a lot on asking the right questions to know what they want, but then are we focusing just as much on delivering that value through our sales proposal and our delivery process?
Okay. So, we’re dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thank you. Very grateful, as always, to have everyone on board. Please take from today how you can be 1% better at delivering value and great outcomes to your customers. Because if we can do that each and every day, it will make the difference to us growing our sales results.
That’s it for today. See you next time. Bye for now.
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