Improve Your Negotiation Skills By Discovering The 1 Factor That Divides The Men From The Boys During A Negotiation Deal
There is 1 central idea, one key concept that is critical to understand.
Get this right and you will be compensated with profitable, gratifying and long term business relationships in which price is not the only factor. If you fail to get this right, you will struggle with sub optimal relationships and you will likely end up haggling about price in almost all of your negotiations.
The key element is understanding the interests of the other side in your negotiations; this is an important element taught in negotiation training.
Most of us have a good understanding of our own objectives, needs and desires. When we negotiate with others, we typically set about trying to persuade them of our opinion. We think it makes sense to us, surely it must make sense to anyone that is reasonable. The problem with this method is that it completely disregards the objectives, needs and desires of the other side.
What good is it trying to persuade someone to do anything that they don't believe would be in alignment with their objectives, beliefs and wishes?
You will not under any circumstances persuade anybody to agree with you by disagreeing with them, quite the opposite will happen. Because you tell someone that they are incorrect and you are the one that is right, you will compel them to defend their stance rather than listen to yours. Nobody likes to be told that they are wrong and if you express to them that they are incorrect it will become very important for them to defend their stance because their personal credibility is at risk.
It is rare to achieve consensus with someone after you have told them that they are wrong, you have also managed to paint yourself into a corner. If it was important for you to reach consensus and you loose the argument, then you will have to compromise your own integrity by departing from your 'correct' stance to embrace the argument of the other side.
If you want to reach agreement the easy way rather than have your negotiations spiral into a positional argument, here's my suggestion:
Start by asking some questions, the best of which you can ask will be questions designed to uncover the interests behind the positions that your counterparts have assumed in the negotiation. Open questions are the best kind of questions to reveal the interest or motivators that reinforce your counterpart's positions.
Here's a great question you can use and simultaneously endorsing your negotiation skills: Why are you negotiating with me / my organisation?
This is very probably the best question to ask at the start of a negotiation. Follow this question by asking the other side to elaborate on and to prioritise the reasons offered in response to your questions. Then you will have a prioritised list of their key interests.
Sample Interests:
- Individual: Security, Acknowledgment and Control
- Organisation: Profit, Risk Avoidance and Strategic Fit (Some important elements you would have learned in purchasing training)
Once you have an understanding of your counterparts' key interests it is a good idea to reveal your own interests. Once all the parties to the negotiation have disclosed their interests it will be much easier to recognise the areas of common ground and then it is useful to present your argument in the context of how it would serve their interests. This way, you will not have to persuade the other side that your stance is correct; you will only have to show that your suggested course of action would satisfy their interests.