How do I Allow my Customer to Negotiate an Estimate?

Why is Negotiating Skills Important for your Business? 

Negotiating skills are paramount in today's business scenario where you have a hyper-connected and competitive market. Here are a few reasons why negotiation skills are absolutely important for any business irrespective of its type and size.

Creates Win-Win situations - The first and foremost thing is that negotiation is not about competing with the opposition and beating them out. In fact, it's about creating a win-win situation where its beneficial to your business as well as your clients. A good negotiator has the ability to create alternative strategies that can be beneficial for all the parties involved.

Good negotiation skill is much need for business success, as they

• Help in creating better relationships
• Deliver long term solutions to all concerned
• Avoids problems and conflicts in the future

Qualities of a good negotiator

A good negotiator is  as  following

• good planner
• creative
• win-win oriented
• good communicator
• flexible
• honest.

Here let's choose one of the qualities to say, good communication skills. There are three types of communicators.

1. Passive
2. Aggressive
3. Assertive

A Passive negotiator gives in too easily to the demands of the client. And at times they are low on confident and adopt the ambiguous language. They are not ideal for a business scenario.

While Aggressive negotiators take a confrontational approach that may destroy the negotiation process altogether.

Finally, we have Assertive Negotiators who are not only confident but also considerate. These kind of negotiators are ideal for the business where they keep the negotiating going and they facilitate mutually beneficial outcomes. The language used by the assertive negotiators are never critical or emotional but strong and factual.

Therefore, when a business sends a estimation letter to the customer, they need it framed by an assertive negotiator who use persuasive language and strive for mutual beneficial solutions.

Once the estimate has been created for the customer, it can be sent to a customer for his approval. The estimate can be approved or rejected or changes can be requested by the customer.  Go through the following steps.

Steps to Negotiate an Estimate with a Customer

1. Log in and access Estimates App from your universal navigation panel.  
2. Create a new estimate or select an existing estimate to get approval. 
3. Click on “Send” button to email an estimate to the customer.
   
4. Your customer can view a hyper link in their mail as shown in the image below.
5. Click on the Hyperlink to view your Estimate.
   
6. Your customer can able to view the "Request Change" button. Click on it.
7. Enter the changes in a text editor and click on "Send" button.
   
8. Now you can able to view that particular estimate in "Change Requested" of estimates status.
   
9. Click on that particular estimate, you can able to view the customer request with its history under Estimate history section.