Host: How can I negotiate agreements that build more consistent business?
Sean McArdle: Negotiating agreements that build business are really called sales and all salespeople should be expert negotiators. The way that you do it is you put yourself in front of more people than anybody else and then you negotiate with more people than anybody else and you develop the skills of a great negotiator, so that every time you are in front of somebody you become twice as effective today as you were last year. Now, this does a lot of things for you. For instance, believe it or not, the most important skill that Tiger Woods has is not golf. There are many, many people who can play golf as well as Tiger Woods, at least for a single round of golf. The other day in fact, I was watching him win the PGA championship and in a period of 20 minutes, I watched 15 golfers hit the ball from hundreds of yards away to only feet from the pin and that is real skill.
Why then is it that Tiger always wins? The answer is his skill is at winning. So, when we negotiate, we want to keep in mind that we always want to keep working on our negotiating skills because over time, we will win more consistently and once you start to get what you want, you never want to give it back.