Power and Influence in Sales Negotiation

Negotiation is one of the most important aspects of selling and buying (Neslin and Greenhalgh, 1983) and is a very effective marketing vehicle (Roman and Iacobucci, 2010). The negotiations conducted while carrying out a sale involve two parties, a seller and a buyer, interacting voluntarily to come up with an exchange agreement which will be a compromise between each party's interests and expectations (Patton and Balakrishnan, 2010). This applies whether both stakeholders are firms (e.g., B2B with a purchasing manager as the buyer and a marketing manager as the seller) or where the buyer is an individual (e.g., B2C). Existing empirical research primarily focuses on one aspect of the sales dyad — the buyer. Over-emphasizing buyer behavior is misleading since the seller's negotiation orientation is just as critical to the outcome of dyadic interactions (Mintu-Wimsatt and Gassenheimer, 1996). The bilateral context of sales negotiation allows both sellers and buyers to have some monopoly power (Rapoport et al., 1995). Typical examples are a buyer with a sole supplier or a vendor with a unique product that has special value for a particular industrial customer…