A model of negotiation issue-based tactics in business-to-business sales negotiations

摘要

Many business-to-business transactions rely on negotiation, yet extant research has not addressed key questions about what is negotiated and how. To tackle this persistent research gap, this article adopts a qualitative approach and seeks to discover, describe, and analyze negotiation issue-based tactics, defined as tactics that draw specifically on the negotiation content and issues. Data from semi-structured interviews with 39 sales and purchasing experts, employed by companies active in the industrial and service project business sectors, undergo analysis according to the Gioia methodology. The resulting model of negotiation issue-based tactics features business and industry-specific negotiation issue subsets, as well as buyer/seller role properties as important boundary conditions. Tactical advantages and safeguarding emerge as two functions of issue-based tactics. Overall, this article identifies 11 tactics that deal with the number, the order, or the characteristics of negotiation issues and may partly serve as best practices for managers. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.