Running a successful business requires you to establish good business relationships with clients and vendors. It is important that you do not just throw business cards in their hands and get your services done. In order to run a good business, you have to know how to negotiate contracts to sell your products or services to your clients. Negotiating contracts to sell your products or services to your clients can be difficult and even boring at times. Here are some useful tips on how to negotiate contracts to sell your business.
Identify the Persons involved: Before you begin your negotiations always identify the persons involved in the deal. Do not waste time negotiating with a junior individual who only needs to agree on what the boss wants. If you feel this is taking place, politely ask to be placed in contact with the individual in charge to talk about the business. The reason for placing you in contact with them is to obtain more information on the status of the sales. If you proceed with verbal agreements without meeting the persons involved then you will never know for certain if you are getting a fair price or if you are being treated unfairly.
Understand the Commercial Code: Before you enter into any sales transactions with your clients you must understand the uniform commercial code. This helps protect you as well as your business. You should read through your contracts very carefully to see what you are agreeing to. Once you understand the Commercial Code you can negotiate better deals for your goods and services. You should also check the references in your contracts and make sure that they are not tied to one another.
Include the non-recourse clause: When you enter into business contracts you should make provisions which allow you to collect legal remedies if your customer is unable to pay for the goods or services you have provided. In all business contracts on a non-recourse clause must be included, this means that if you have to repay something you cannot be forced to do so. It is important to understand all the legal remedies you can use before entering into any agreement.
No assignment: Every contract should identify that it is a contract, and therefore it should give the parties to the contract the right to assign or transfer their rights in the contract to someone else. Most often the law will hold one party to be legally binded to perform a specific action once the other party is breaches the contract. However, a contract does not need to name the other party as the assignee. One other important point to understand is that once a person transfers any rights in a contract to another person there is no longer an obligation on the part of the original party to perform anything with respect to those rights. For instance, you can assign your rights in any transaction to another person, you don’t necessarily have to use a lawyer to do so.
No assignment or delegation: Every agreement between parties to a transaction needs to assign some legal rights to each of the parties. However, where there are clauses limiting who has the rights to something being assigned, the agreement may fail the test. The contract may have been poorly worded or the parties may have never intended for the agreement to fail the test. You can avoid these types of scenarios by clearly stating what your intentions are during the drafting of the agreement. If your intention is clearly stated in the contract then there is a very strong possibility that you will achieve the result that you were intending for.
Consumer Protection laws protect the consumer and require all consumers to be treated fairly. However, when you enter into contracts with other companies or people the law does not require the companies to be bound by consumer protection laws in the way it requires companies to be bound by contract terms. Often, the consumer is caught out by the hidden costs of the agreement and they feel disadvantaged by the behaviour of the other company and/or person they entered into contracts with. It is important that if you enter into a consumer deal you understand all the consumer protection implications of it and that you know how to resolve disputes as necessary.
Business Contracts can also fall foul of the law for the same reason, because verbal agreements are not legally binding. verbal agreements cannot be enforced against the other party. For example, it may be that you create a contract with someone but you don’t actually have anything to deliver. Therefore, the contract doesn’t come into force. Because the other party cannot enforce their verbal agreements against you, they can often take advantage of this vulnerability to extract more money from you.