Chris Voss is arguably the world’s leading expert on negotiation. In his book, Never Split the Difference, he highlights counter-intuitive tactics and strategies that he learned from his 24 years in the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit.

I used to believe that Think Win:Win was the most effective strategy for negotiations until Chris Voss changed my perspective.

Now I focus on using intentional emotional intelligence to improve my negotiation results.

Here is an introduction to why win-win is not the best negotiation strategy and a set of seven intentional emotional intelligence suggestions for how you can improve your own negotiation skills.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as a “win-win” compromise.

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A VP of Customer Success at a Silicon Valley SaaS company recently told me that his CEO and board of directors are not OK with 30% annualized growth. To reach their IPO and revenue objectives, they want 30–40%+ annualized growth. This is far beyond the average for SaaS companies who typically face a 5% annual churn rate (equal to a net retention of 95%).

To achieve net retention of 130%+ your Account Management and Customer Success teams need a system and these organizational selling steps could be a part of their system.

Leveraging an Account Success Plan and regular Quarterly…

Account Success Plans are the nucleus and ❤️ of every successful customer relationship. Often the customer’s success plan is not written down or clearly defined for everyone in the company. If we don’t know the ‘why’ for a customer or how we add value to their business we’re in trouble.

To help others in the Customer Success community, here are my favorite Account Success Plan templates and some guidance on how to create a success plan for each of your customers.

An Account Success Plan should help anyone at your company to answer these essential questions;

• Why is your customer…

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) or Executive Business Reviews are an essential part of the customer journey in SaaS. QBRs help remind your customer why your solutions add value to their business and how you can help them in the future.

Here is a blueprint on how to run effective QBRs that create tangible action plans and a template deck (Template QBR Deck) that you can use with your customers as a starting point.

The blueprint framework was designed by the WinningByDesign team and includes highlights from my experience. The template QBR deck was designed by SuccessCoaching.

The 🔑 objectives of…