ARE YOU A VICTIMM OF PICOS?

By Jim Camp

Tired Of Shrinking Margins And Your Not Looking Forward To The Next Board Meeting? Lost As To Why The New Product Line Isn't As Profitable As You Planned? If You Think Your Sales, Marketing and Business Development Teams Seem To Be Giving Up Too Much, You Are Not Imagining Things, They Are! Insidious PICOS Has You And It Won't Let Go!

PICOS stands for Program for the Improvement and Cost Optimization of Suppliers. It was created by J. Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua, a former General Motors Corp. Vice President of Worldwide Purchasing, and was designed to force prices as low as possible without regard to cost or profits. How can you recognize and combat it? Here are some tips:

10 Symptoms Of PICOS Negotiating You Can Recognize

1. If you hear in a negotiation meeting, "if we don't give this discount we are not being a good partner!"
2. If you hear from a negotiation team member, "they already think we are arrogant and hard to deal with!"
3. It you are told, "if we don't give them the terms, in my opinion, we will lose the business!"
4. If you request a price increase of your negotiation teams and you hear, "they will throw us out and we will never get back in!" Or, "if we do raise prices they will replace us quickly!"
5. If you hear in a negotiation meeting, "we are 3rd on the list and they told us we probably won't make the cut if we don't come up with a better offer!"
6. If you hear in a negotiation meeting, "well, we are ninety days into the negotiation contract and they say we have to renegotiate or lose the business!"
7. If you hear in a negotiation meeting, "they say we are terrible in service/ maintenance/ response/ problem-solving and if we don't improve we will be replaced!"
8. If you are told by any negotiation team member, "during my negotiation visit I was approached by people that I didn't even know and was asked if we had agreed to the negotiation contract with penalties yet!"
9. If you hear in a negotiation meeting, "they really want us to be a negotiation partner for the long term. They believe the relationship is the most important part of our work together!"
10. If you hear from a negotiation team member, "they told us very clearly several times that they only want a win-win negotiation deal, anything else is not satisfactory!"

5 Steps To Cure The Organization

1. Don't tell any of your negotiation staff, only your trusted advisors of your discovery.
2. In a staff meeting preparing for an important negotiation observe how the preparation is done. If it involves assumptions which include opinions based on past negotiation experience, competition strengths, importance of relationship, leverage or just plain guesses and if negotiation compromises are proposed based on these negotiation assumptions, you are now aware of the win-win, compromise-based negotiation training mindset that PICOS feeds and grows upon.
3. Call in negotiation team leaders and ask their thoughts on what is happening to our margins and how do we fix it?
4. If they don't see a negotiation problem, it is just the way business is done in this day and age, you have some hard staffing decisions. If they express frustration but really don't have a negotiation solution, you do not have a staffing problem.
5. Go to Amazon, or Barnes and Noble or other booksellers and purchase the negotiation training book "Start with No®." If you see hope at the end of negotiation tunnel, call me personally and we can discuss in private the potential negotiation training solutions that others have discovered and enjoyed for a complete negotiation training cure.

Jim Camp's Decision-Based Negotiation™ training has been used successfully by over 100,000 people in business transactions totaling over $100 billion. Visit his negotiation training website at http://www.startwithno.com.

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