Here's how you can assess your value when negotiating a salary in outside sales.

Knowing your duties involved in achieving success in your outside sales is very important when discuss Salary. How you present yourself to a Client, your lifestyle(Housing Allowance, Car Allowance, Wardrobe Allowance), your sales Target, Location of your prospects etc. All this has to be put in place.

This is highly important but can sometimes be difficult to pull off in practice if you are new to an industry or have no idea what the market rate is for the role in question. I've found that relying on websites like salary.com can be unreliable and the best way to get a sense of the going rate in your industry is to talk to a mix of people who have followed the path you are considering. Also - many jobs are quite transparent about what the salary or compensation range is. In sales, some jobs might be commission-only, while others might be a salary-commission mix, or only salary, so those factors will affect how much the pay will actually be as the comp plan is structured ...

Previous Achievements can be used as bases for Salary Negotiation. Knowing your Visible Success Track record can speak Volumes when discussing Value Proposition. Every Employer is keen and knowing what you have achieved in your previous engagement and how you can improve on it when you join their Team.

When you talk about past success, trying to talk about that success in terms of what was the quantifiable business value that was created as a result of that past success. Like, "I discovered that we were paying too much for postage for samples we were mailing out and negotiated a new rate, resulting in a $100,000 annual savings for the company." Right there you quite clearly demonstrate your material value to the company. Think about ways in which your biggest career successes could be thought of in terms of the business you were working for. How did the business prosper from your success?

Everyone is Unique in one or the Other. We must Know our Unique Value (Something U are very good at), when it comes to Outside Sales. This puts you at an advantaged position when discussing Salary and Value. "Each individual is by far than 10,000 persons on one particular thing they do Here on Earth". John C. Maxwell.

Before Engaging on an Outside Sales Role, Our first Role is to able to Sell Ourselves to the Employers Team. This is where Negotiation Skills comes in. Being flexible, indicating the great benefits it will be for them to have you on their Team, letting them know it's not all about Salary but the Positive Impact you are ready to make on the Overall Image of the Organization.

The old adage "everything is negotiable" is both true and false. In theory, yes, everything is negotiable, but job seekers will find that some entry level roles have comp plans that are pretty much non-negotiable. But as you rise in your career, negotiation skills 100% come into play in terms of comp negotiations. A salary negotiation is basically a sales pitch. And in its essence, a sales pitch involves identifying a need on the part of the buyer that your solution will address. So in salary negotiation, your job is figure out that NEED your prospective new company has that ONLY YOU can SOLVE. This will increase your perceived "value" and help you get as much as possible out of the salary negotiation.

I agree that organizations want to know that people are going to stick around but the reality is that life happens and the only constant in life is change. I'm not saying don't say you want to be around for the long haul, if you truly believe that in the moment, but I'm also not sure how important this really is given the often fluid nature of companies and business. Demonstrating your future potential can certainly resonate with management but sometimes it can create the sense that you are more focused on what's to come rather than the job at hand. The #1 task is to demonstrate the value you can create NOW.