7.3 Check your negotiating qualities
7.4 Develop yourself as a negotiator
Skilful negotiating will improve your life
Many people think that negotiating is just about money and business. It isn’t. We do it instinctively, as children, in our families, and in our communities as well as in business, management, industrial relations and all levels of government. Sometimes we negotiate without realizing it.
I first woke up to negotiating as a young sales manager 35 years ago. Since then I have modified the framework, and learnt as I have gone along. I have collected best practice from all over the world, run training courses on the subject, negotiated with trade unions, and worked with my clients as they have reached agreements with both their employees and customers. I have seen people make all the classic mistakes because they don’t know how to negotiate effectively. I’ve also seen the other side – the huge benefits that come from good negotiating.
This book captures all that experience in the form of 50 secrets presented over seven chapters. If you use these secrets they will help you seize opportunities, make more money, develop relationships and maximize what you will achieve with the rest of your life. The chapters are:
■ Know when to negotiate. There are alternatives to negotiation. Before you start, you need to be sure what is meant by negotiation, and what the alternatives are.
■ Prepare clear objectives. If you know what you want to finish up with, then you are halfway there.
■ Discuss your respective positions. Reaching agreement is much more likely if each party understands where the other is coming from. This is about setting the scene – listening more than you talk, before you propose anything.
■ Deal only in packages. You can’t bargain if you only talk about one thing. You just argue. This chapter shows you how to reach agreement by trading packages.
■ Bargain your way to success. Once you have exchanged packages, then you bargain (compromise) your way to agreement. There may be several stages to this.
■ Find common ground. You don’t want to move apart. You do want to reach agreement and come together. Here’s how.
■ Put it all together. This is a summary of the key secrets and the ideas behind them. They are all important, but this chapter will help you decide on the most important factors in the specific situations that you will find yourself.
Whether you are engaged in buying, selling, industrial relations, domestic disputes or family matters, you are negotiating more often than you realize. Sometimes you will negotiate with someone just once and never see them again. More often we negotiate with people who we have an ongoing relationship with, and we want them to come back to the negotiating table with good feelings towards us.
Follow these secrets so that you can negotiate sucessfully in any situation.
Negotiating is about ‘give and take’. It is a means by which we compromise and agree a way forward. This chapter looks at how you can decide whether to negotiate or use some other process. It also emphasizes the importance of achieving outcomes satisfactory to both parties. In most negotiations we want the other party to feel comfortable with what has been agreed so we can move forward and develop an ongoing relationship that is valuable to both of us.
1.1 Be clear what negotiating is
If you are to be good at negotiating, you need to know what it is, and what it is not. It is not selling; it is a system of ‘give and take’ that allows two parties to reach agreement. It is about compromise.
Many people confuse selling with negotiating, and this is likely to make them poor sellers and poor negotiators. If you sell, you are persuading a customer that they want something. You negotiate with them then you agree how much it is worth, how many they will have, when you will deliver it, and the payment terms that will apply. In other words you will agree, or negotiate, a package.
The concept of packages is crucial to understanding negotiation. If the only thing you discuss is price, you can’t negotiate. You will simply
one minute wonder Look at today’s newspaper. It will contain many stories that involve negotiating. World leaders will be negotiating with one another; companies will be negotiating with their employees, and opposing sides in wars – with luck – will be negotiating peace.
“Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this – no dog exchanges bones with another”
Adam Smith, Scottish economist, author of The Wealth of Nations
haggle or argue. When you introduce two or more variables, you have a package on which you can reach a mutually acceptable compromise.
To fully understand what negotiating means you have to appreciate that in most business situations you don’t negotiate with someone just once in your life. Usually, you will negotiate with them many times, possibly over many years. So it is helpful to think of those that we negotiate with as a partner.
Usually you need your negotiating partners to leave a negotiation with you feeling that they’ve ‘won’. Of course, you want to win too. When both parties feel that they have won, this is called win-win.
So, to help you understand what negotiation is, I have introduced a few key ideas that will be fully developed later in this book:
Give and take. This is the essence of negotiating.
Packages. These are what you deal in.
Partner. This is who you negotiate with.
Win-win. This is how you want to end up, with both parties happy and ready to do business with each other again.
Hopefully, you will recognize that these ideas are not just the stuff of reaching commercial agreement – they also allow communities to thrive and allow us to co-exist as human beings.
This book will show that you negotiate more often than you realize. Once you realize you are doing it, you will be more successful.
Before you start negotiating, be clear that you are prepared to ‘give and take’.
1.2 Consider alternatives to negotiating