Opening Customer negotiations
The first reaction of a lot of please is to say No, it’s not for sale or we can’t sell it. That’s natural because you’re calling them out of the blue and asking for something strange, not to mention for them to give up something they feel they need.
The first step in the negotiation is to find the right person. That may be simple if it’s a small business or individual, but in a large organization that can be hard to do. The good side of that is that t are several doors in many large organizations. Unfortunately, even when you think you know this, you can still get tripped up by someone else getting involved at the last minute. There’s no magic trick to approaching an owner. If there was, it would be meeting them in person, being extremely honest and sincere and as I already mentioned, knowing their hot buttons. After that the next most important tip is to take your time. The more rushed you are the more you have to pay their price or whatever they want for it.
Posture affects the Price
When evaluating toll free numbers I usually give 2 prices. One is if the buyer approaches the seller and the other is if the seller approaches the buyer. And in the first case the price is usually about twice with it would be in the second case. You can meet in the middle though if you take your time and are willing to walk away from it if you have to.
This brings us to 2 more important points. First you should know what your options are (see The 800 Search Process), because just knowing them can save you money and make a tough negotiation a little easier. You don’t even need to pay for the number if you find something available with our website. You can reserve it for free for 15 days just in case you need it, although there’s a good chance this will take longer than that. (Tip: We usually try to keep reservations for 30 days though, to give people a little more lee-way.)
You should also consider having multiple numbers for tracking purposes anyway. So you can always use more than one number anyway, whether its for your cell phone, a fax or a secondary use or for tracking the response to a particular advertising. End user negotiations have at least a reasonable probability of failure so it’s important to always have a backup plan.
The second point that comes from the higher price if you approach the seller is to try to get them to approach you. This isn’t easy and can be tricky but it can work well if you have a third party contact them and offer to sell their number. If they’re interested, you could wind up getting the inside information. They’ll be more honest about what they ultimately want for it and the whole negotiation will go a lot easier with your nephew acting as the intermediary. This should probably be under advanced tips because this definitely isn’t your standard approach, but it does have it’s place.
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Brian Packer says:
April 23, 2008 at 12:32 am
With domain names you can often offer someone who owns an 800 number $ for buying it from them - even if it isn’t going inactive. Maybe they don’t use it much. Is that something you can help with? None of these spell what we were hoping for.
Brian Packer
Bill Quimby (197 comments.) says:
April 23, 2008 at 9:56 am
Unfortunately there’s no whois database for toll free numbers. I can give you some advice on doing that, but we can’t really track down the customer or approach them or negotiate for you.
Bill