Negotiation Strategies

When entering any negotiation, no matter what is being discussed, most people want to win, they want to come out ahead. Often winning the negotiation is far more important than what was actually negotiated, and few bargains are more gratifying to the human heart than a clear and simple victory. But getting that win, mastering the negotiation, can be a very difficult thing to do.

It takes a clever person, possessed of considerable guile with a healthy does of persuasion techniques to rise to the top of the heap. Or so popular convention would have you believe. Here are some easy tips to learning the mind-controlling negotiation strategies and tactics that the masters of persuasion have used for centuries.

SUBTLE COERCION
The key to gaining the upper hand in any negotiation and bending your counterpart’s mind to your will, to your control, is to be coercive in a very subtle, nuanced manner. The key is to make it appear as though you are giving ground and letting them get what they want, to distract them while you maneuver the negotiation toward what you wish to gain. This takes an incredible amount of skill to pull off, and you will need to practice it again and again in order to master it. Read the rest of this entry »

On numerous occasions, I have participated in negotiations as a technical consultant on behalf of clients. In order to save time and money, the client often prepares for these negotiations themselves. Through many previous bad experiences, I have learned to ask clients in advance what their idea of negotiation strategies and being prepared actually is. Their answers often show, however, that they are not yet ready to begin an effective negotiation session.

Inexperienced, lazy, or naive negotiators believe that being prepared means ‘knowing what they want’ out of the negotiations, which generally implies that they have decided on terms that they would be happy with. They may even have given some thought to their worst case scenario, but that tends to be the extent of their negotiation strategies and preparations.

Knowing what you want from a negotiation is only a small part of what it takes to be prepared. The key to success is knowing how you are going to get what you want. Success comes from having effective negotiation strategies that convince the other side that what you want is actually fair and reasonable – or, at the very least, inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »

Negotiations are the key to reaching agreement in a conflict situation. Without the proper training, it can be very difficult to reach a satisfactory agreement with your counterpart in a tense negotiation setting. This is why many successful companies choose to utilize expert negotiation training seminars. Negotiation courses, tailored to your particular line of business as well as the specific types of negotiations you face in your typical business dealings, are invaluable both for gaining new skills and in helping you succeed in future deals.

Conflict arises because you and the other party in a business deal have differing opinions about what solution is the best outcome for a particular situation. It might be the wording of a contract, or the terms of a sale. No matter what the conflict might be, negotiating can be an effective means for both parties to come to an agreeable compromise.

One of the most important skills a negotiator will learn in training is formulating a clear objective of what to expect from the process of negotiating. This must be kept at the forefront for the other steps you will take in preparing for your conflict negotiation. Knowing what the objective is then allows you to consider modifications that could be made to your terms and still allow you to achieve your objective. This is invaluable in helping to provide solutions so that you and your negotiator counterpart can come to a reasonable solution. Knowing what your objective is also gives you a starting place to determine what the benchmark will be for the minimum terms acceptable for reaching an agreement on the issue. Read the rest of this entry »