Archive for the ‘negotiation tactics’ Category

« Older Entries

Get What You Want By Bringing A Purple Monkey To Your Next Negotiation

Friday, January 6th, 2012
Image CreditThe purple monkey will help you get what you want in a negotiation

The purple monkey will help you get what you want in a negotiation

How did your last negotiation go? Did you and the other side of the table spend your time working through a long list of demands that the other side had made? Did you end up feeling as though you had negotiated for a very long time? The next time that you prepare for a negotiation, you need to come up with a way to streamline the process so that you can reach an agreement quickly. It turns out that you can make this happen by bringing a purple monkey to the negotiations.

Don’t Let The Other Side Control The Negotiation

When you sit down to negotiate, who’s in charge? I mean, it’s either you or them, right? Why let them take charge? Why not seize the reigns of the negotiation process right off the bat and take charge?

If you don’t do this, then what can happen? In short order, no matter what negotiation styles or negotiating techniques you are using, you may find yourself spending a lot of time talking about things that you really don’t want to be talking about. Things that you don’t want to talk about can be broken into two groups: trivial things and dangerous things.

Trivial things are those things that show up on the long list of push-backs to your proposal that you get from the other side. It’s always very hard to determine which of these items are real issues, and which ones have just been brought up so that the other side has some negotiating currency to play around with.

Dangerous things are those issues that you really don’t want to have to negotiate about with the other side of the table. These can relate to shortcomings that you know that your offer has, or issues where you have not been given any flexibility by your management. No matter what the cause is, you know that if you have to spend a lot of time discussing these types of issues, things are not going to go well for you.

How A Purple Monkey Can Help You Control The Negotiation

If you want to take control of your next negotiation, then you need to bring a purple monkey to the table. No, I’m not suggesting that you go down to the zoo and ask for a loaner — that wouldn’t be part of a principled negotiation. Rather, I’m going to suggest that you do a little bit of work before the negotiations start in order to ensure that they go the way that you want them to go.

Here’s what you need to do. Take a look at the issue that you’re going to be negotiating. Focus on the proposal that you’ll be bringing to the table. Now, go ahead and add an unreasonable request to your proposal. Something that you know that the other side just won’t be able to sit for. Slide it right in there and make sure that nobody removes it before it gets presented to the other side.

This unreasonable request is your “purple monkey”. It’s so big and unacceptable that it’s going to completely capture the other side’s attention. They are going to look at that and instantly they are going to start to try to come up with ways to get you to remove it from your proposal.

Oh sure, you will eventually remove it. However, it’s going to take a lot of convincing by the other side to get you to do it. The effect of this is that the other side is going to be distracted and they’re not going to notice all of the trivial things that they would otherwise put on a list to negotiate with you.

Likewise, that purple monkey is going to be so distracting that there is a very good chance that the other side won’t think to bring up the dangerous issues that you really don’t want to talk about. Simply by bringing the purple monkey to the table, you’ve taken control of the negotiation and you’ve steered it in the direction that you wanted it to go.

What All Of This Means For You

In any negotiations, there are going to be demands placed on you by the other side of the table – there’s nothing that you can do about this. However, what you can control is what those demands are and how many of them there are.

In order to prevent the other side from creating a long list of items to be discussed over a long period of time, be proactive. When you make your initial proposal to them, include a purple monkey in it. This item is one that you know will be completely unacceptable to the other side. In fact, it will completely gain their attention and make them insist that it be removed from your proposal. By causing them to focus on your purple monkey, you’ll shorten the list of other items that need to be negotiated.

Although adding this purple monkey technique to your negotiation definition may seem to be simple to do, it turns out that it is very powerful. Take control of your next negotiation by spending the time before the negotiation and find out how you can bring your purple monkey to the table so that you can reach a better deal quicker.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you should limit yourself to bringing only one purple monkey to the negotiation or should you bring more?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Negotiator Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What’s your goal for your next negotiation? If you are like 99.9% of the other negotiators out there, you want to have the other side agree to your requests while at the same time not having to agree to too many of their requests. Hmm, how best to make this happen? It turns out that one of the keys to having the negotiation process turn out the way that you want them to starts long before the actual negotiations do – it happens when the room where you’ll be doing your negotiation is selected.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in negotiation tactics | No Comments »

Why A Missing Person May Be A Negotiator’s Best Friend

Friday, August 26th, 2011
Image Credit When Somebody Isn't There, They Control The Negotiations

When Somebody Isn't There, They Control The Negotiations

Is it possible that a person who is not present at a negotiation could be the one person who controls how the negotiation turns out? The answer, somewhat surprisingly, turns out to be an unequivocal yes! If you want to make this negotiating technique work for you (and learn how to defend against it), we’re going to have to have a talk…

What Is The Missing Person Authority Tactic?

In order for a sales negotiation to wrap up, you always need a person on your side of the table to approve the final deal. Once you’ve got all of the details worked out, the final step in the process is for the deal to be presented to this person in order to get their stamp of approval.

The missing person tactic occurs when after all of the negotiations have wrapped up, this very important person is nowhere to be found. If they can’t be found, they can’t sign off on the deal that has been reached. This means that things go into a weird sort of suspend animation while everyone waits for that person to reappear.

How Can You Use A Missing Person To Your Advantage?

The power associated with this tactic comes from the simple fact that all that waiting can play havoc with the other side of the table. As the days slip away, the simple fact that they are so tantalizingly close to having a completed deal starts to eat at them.

Soon they start to become desperate to close the deal. As they search for ways to move things to a close, they start to offer to make additional concessions. Perhaps small concessions in the beginning, but these can become much larger offers as time moves on. Although they are giving something up by making these offers, they view it as a last ditch effort to salvage a deal that seems to be slipping away.

The secret to the missing person tactic is that more often than not, the person with final approval authority really isn’t missing. Instead they just didn’t want to sign the deal as it originally stood. By making themselves “unavailable” they were able to ratchet up the pressure on the other side of the table and improve the quality of the deal that was finally presented to them.

How Can You Defend Against The Missing Person Tactic?

Hopefully you can see how powerful the missing person tactic can be. This does bring up the awkward question about what you should do if you find yourself in a situation where this tactic is being used against you.

Clearly you can’t stop someone from employing the missing person tactic against you; however, you can change how you and your firm react to it. The reason that this tactic is so successful is that it uses time to cause you to do things that you normally would not do.

When you find yourself being subjected to this tactic, the #1 thing that you need to do, and do quickly, is to let everyone at your company understand what is happening. You need to let them know that the negotiations have gone into a sort of “hold mode” and that they will remain there until the other side of the table decides to move things forward.

Your best defense is to do nothing. By not allowing the passage of time to get to you, you’ll take away the power that this tactic gives to the other side of the table. Eventually they’ll have to either make the missing person available to approve the deal or they’ll have to come back to the table and open up negotiations once again.

What All Of This Means For You

The world of negotiating is filled with different ways to bend the other side of the table to your way of thinking. The missing person tactic is a classic way of doing this.

By ensuring that a person who is required to approve any deal that is made becomes “unavailable”, you have the ability to put pressure on the other side of the table. As time drags on they’ll become more and more desperate to close the deal. This is when they will start to make more concessions just to wrap things up. You need to be careful to not fall into the same trap when this tactic is applied to you.

Time is a constant factor in any sales negotiation. Using the missing person tactic allows you to harness the power of time and make it work for you. As with all tactics, you need to be careful when and how you use this approach. Done wisely, and the missing person may turn out to be the most important member of your negotiating team!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™

Question For You: What do you think would be the right “trigger” that would cause you to start to use the missing person tactic?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Negotiator Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I love to negotiate. Give me an objective, sit me down across the table from somebody who has what I want and let me at them. However, as gung-ho as I am, there are times that I run out of new things to say. I’ve said it all. What should I do next?

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in negotiation tactics | No Comments »

Going Up? How Sales Negotiators Deal With Escalation

Friday, June 17th, 2011
Image Credit Sales Negotiators Need To Know How To Ride An Escalation

Sales Negotiators Need To Know How To Ride An Escalation

Just when you think that you’ve got everything nailed down in a sales negotiation, you just might run into the issue of escalating authority. Sure you’ve reached a deal with the other side of the table, but then all of a sudden somebody else gets involved and it turns out that they don’t like your deal. What’s a sales negotiator to do?

What Is Escalating Authority?

The escalating authority tactic is a sneaky one – often you don’t see it coming until it’s too late. The way that it works is actually pretty simple. You sit down with the other side of the table and you work to hash out a deal. In the end, you both finally come up with a deal that you believe that both of you can live with.

Emotionally you believe that you are just about done with this sale and you start to think about all of the other things that you need to start to work on. That’s when you get surprised. What happens is that the other side of the table comes back to you and says that there’s a problem.

What he says is that there are other people in his organization who have to approve the deal that the two of you have created. He’ll tell you that somebody is unwilling to approve the deal as it currently stands. They want more concessions from you in order for them to sign it.

You might be saying to yourself “I’d never give in and agree to more concessions.” Well, it turns out that a lot of us actually do give in and do end up making more concessions – that’s why this technique is so effective.

How Can You Make Escalating Authority Work For You?

We all think the same thing when we bump into a powerful new negotiating technique: how can I make this thing work for me? If you are going to want to harness this powerful tool, then you’re going to have to understand why it works.

The main driver behind this technique is that the other side of the table already has a significant investment in making the deal happen. The escalation to authority is based on the other side being willing to do more in order to achieve what they think is already almost theirs.

When they encounter the escalating authority tactic, the other side believes that they have only two choices. The first is to make a concession and allow the deal to happen. The other is to refuse to make a concession and be willing to sit down and start the negotiating process all over again.

How Can You Defend Against Escalating Authority?

If there’s a powerful negotiating tactic out there, then you know that someday it’s going to be used against you. When this happens, and it will, you’ll need to know what to do in order to counteract its powerful force.

Right off the bat, you’ve got the most powerful countermeasure available to you: leave. Get up and walk out the door. If you do this, then all of the power associated with the escalating authority tactic instantly vanishes.

When this tactic starts to be used against you, you need to immediately inform the rest of your company what is going on. Your purpose for doing this is pretty simple: you want them to get used to the idea of waiting – no deal is going to be struck anytime soon.

One final countermeasure is to just wait. Just as you have a large investment in making a deal happen, so too does the other side of the table. This means that if you just put a stop to everything, they’ll soon start to feel as though the deal that was almost theirs is starting to slip away. This may force them to drop their request for more concessions.

What All Of This Means For You

In the end, the use of escalating authority should be viewed simply as being yet another negotiating tactic that we all have available to us. As with all such tactics the key is to understand when it should be used.

When you’ve gotten the other side to commit to a doing a deal, but you think that you can still get some more concessions out of them, the escalation tactic can be a good tool to use. However, if someone starts to use it against you, then you’ll need to inform the rest of your company so that they will support you as you deal with it.

Anytime other people get involved in a negotiation in which a deal has already been reached an element of danger is introduced. The deal that seemed to be so close, may now look farther away. Careful how you use escalating authority – just make sure that the gains that you’re looking for are worth the risk that you’ll be introducing.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™

Question For You: Under what circumstances do you think it’s worth the risk to use the escalating authority tactic?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Negotiator Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What’s your most valuable resource? You might have said money, but I’m willing to bet that it’s really something else – time. You can always earn more money, but once you spend time on some task, it’s gone, gone, gone. That’s why when you are negotiating with someone it is critical that you quickly get an answer to the most important question: how much authority do they really have?

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in negotiation tactics | No Comments »

Yes, You Can Buy Now And Negotiate Later – But Be Careful…

Friday, May 6th, 2011
Image Credit
When You Put Off Negotiating, You Never Know What You're Getting Into…

When You Put Off Negotiating, You Never Know What You're Getting Into…

How do you feel about negotiating? If you really don’t like to do it, then I’ve got a great option for you: just go ahead and buy something and then worry about doing the negotiating later on. Wait you say, is this even possible. The answer is yes, but you might want to think twice before you do it…

The Idea Behind Negotiating Later On

The very idea of agreeing to make a purchase and then putting the negotiating off until later on seems crazy, doesn’t it? Under normal circumstances, I’d agree with you; however, not all circumstances that we find ourselves in are what we’d call “normal”…

An obvious case in point would be a situation in which you have very limited time to find a solution to a problem. If your car breaks down on the highway, then the first tow truck that comes along is the one that you’ll be willing to purchase towing services from with basically no negotiation. After you’ve been towed to a gas station, that’s when the real negotiating will probably start.

The disadvantage of handling deal making this way can be significant. Once you’ve told the other side of the table that you’re going to buy from them, you’re basically locked in. This means that a great deal of the power in the eventual negotiations has transferred from you to the other side.

Additionally, the other side is in the driver’s seat when it comes to setting a final price for the item that you’ve purchased. Under the wrong circumstances, you may end up paying a much higher price than the thing that you bought was worth.

Why Putting Off Negotiating Might Be A Good Idea — Sometimes

So clearly there are some risks to deferring the process of negotiating a deal. However, at the same time there are a number of reasons that you might want to consider this approach to resolving an issue.

Many tasks that we are looking to have others complete for us are complex. The ability to fully evaluate the other side of the table’s ability to do the work can be prohibitive. Simply awarding them the job and then evaluating their work once they’re done can be a clever way of determining their skill level.

Using the other side of the table’s known history of deal making can provide you with the confidence to move faster. If you need to have the work done and you believe that you can trust the other side to strike a fair deal, then buying before you negotiate can provide you with the advantage of speed.

Not all jobs can be fully estimated before the work is started. For this type of work, you’re going to have to select your partner and have the work commence before you can determine just exactly how large the deal is. Situations like this are perfect for using a “not to exceed” clause in order to make sure that you are not taken advantage of.

What All Of This Means For You

It turns out that it is possible to turn the standard negotiating model on its head and buy something first, and then agree to negotiate later on. This is a unique way of going about getting what you want right now!

Setting up a deal this way comes with a series of risks. The most important of these risks is that you are now locked into using a single vendor – they’ve got you. However, this approach can be used when you simply don’t have any time to go through the negotiating process.

The most important thing is to know is who you are dealing with. When you know the other side of the table, then you are able to make a judgment call about whether the risk is worth the reward. Under the right circumstances, this can be the right way to quickly solve a problem.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Negotiator Newsletter are now available. Learn how to close more deals — faster. Subscribe now: Click Here!

Question For You: Can you think of any conditions that you could include in a deal where you bought now and negotiated later on?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When we talk about what it takes to be successful in your next sales negotiation, we often talk about how much authority you can bring to your side of the table. Your basic goal needs to be to show up to the negotiation with as much authority as you can bring – you are “the man” as they say. You can make decisions, cut deals, and even make concessions. You can do whatever it takes to make a deal happen. It turns out that we may have gotten this all wrong – maybe what we should be doing is showing up with no authority…

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in negotiation tactics | 1 Comment »

The Most Important Word In Negotiating Begins With A “P”

Friday, April 1st, 2011
Image Credit
Negotiators Need To Remember Who Won The Race

Negotiators Need To Remember Who Won The Race

All too often when we see negotiators in the movies, they are portrayed as slick, fast talking folks who always seem to effortlessly get their way. The first thing that we need to realize that this is the movies and so it in no way represents real life. The second thing that we need to realize is that when we see negotiators portrayed this way, we’re being taught the wrong lesson. For you see, in negotiations, speed kills…

The Most Important Word In Negotiating

The art of negotiating is truly that – an art. Sure there are a lot of skills and tactics that help one get what they want to get out of a negotiation that much quicker; however, in the end, reaching a deal with the other side takes creativity.

In this day and age of immediate gratification, the single most important word that a negotiator needs to remember is the one that it is the hardest to hear – patience. Just as the Grand Canyon was not created overnight, so to are the best negotiations not completed quickly.

If you want to have any hope of ever being a successful negotiator, then you are going to have to learn to be patient – more patient than you are today. Patience is the one thing that allows both sides of the table to work through those things that are preventing a deal from happening. It’s also how the time is found to search for more creative solution to impasses, the ones that we all like to call “win-win” solutions.

If you can slow down your natural desire to rush through a negotiation, you’ll be able to take the time to fully understand what the other side of the table is trying to accomplish. Patience is something that will also give you time to adjust to the offer that the other side of the table is making to you. What seemed unacceptable awhile ago, upon further reflection may become something that you can live with.

Why Patience Works So Well

Nobody wants to hear that having patience is the key to being a successful negotiator. We are all looking for that secret “black belt” negotiating tactic that will cause the other side of the table to roll over and give us anything that we ask them for. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

Instead, you have this powerful, but difficult to use strategy called patience. Patience works for you in the end not because of any magical qualities that it has, but rather because of what it allows to happen when you use it.

When you have the strength to be patient, you’ll allow the other side of the table’s expectations for what they’re going to get out of the negotiation to change. We all enter a negotiation thinking that we’re going to get everything that we want. If you can be patient, then the other side will start to understand that they’re not going to get everything that they want, but (if you’ll excuse the Rolling Stones song reference) they are going to get everything that they need.

Every negotiation is a stressful situation. Not only are the different sides exerting stress on each other, but they are also struggling with stress internally. If you have the ability to remain patient and wait them out, those internal stresses will continue to grow. If you are willing to wait long enough, those forces will cause enough stress and confusion for the other side that they’ll be more willing to reach a deal with you just to end the negotiations.

Finally, as much as you hate to be patient, the other side will hate to have you being so patient. When you are patient, things move more slowly and nobody can stand that – can’t we just get this thing done? As a direct result of your patience, the other side will start to do things in order to hurry the process up. More often than not this includes making some concessions just to get things to hurry along. Not a bad payoff for just being patient!

What All Of This Means For You

Far more important than any clever negotiating tactic, the ability to be patient is the one skill that will always serve a negotiator well. By taking the time to allow a negotiating session to unfold, a negotiator will allow more facts and realities to be revealed and by doing so it will become that much easier to eventually reach a deal with the other side.

Patience is such a powerful tool because of what it does to the other side of the table. It has the ability to transform them from an unstoppable force into a mild mannered partner.

It’s not easy to be patient during a negotiation, especially when the stakes are high. However, negotiators who can learn to be patient will find that they are the ones who are able to strike better deals quicker.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that there are situations in which you need to become impatient in order to strike a deal with the other side of the table?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just how long do you think that your next sales negotiation is going to last? I’ve got news for you – it may not last as long as you may think that it’s going to last. The reason is that either side of the table may use deadlines to help hurry things along. If this happens, will you recognize that it’s happening and, more importantly, will you know what to do when it happens to you?

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in negotiation tactics | No Comments »

« Older Entries