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Plan Your Next Negotiation, Negotiate Your Plan, Be Successful

Friday, January 27th, 2012
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In order to be successful in a negotiation, you need to have a plan

In order to be successful in a negotiation, you need to have a plan

When I’m working with negotiators who are trying to become better, they always ask me what the secret to moving to the next level is. For years I always told them that there was no “silver bullet” that would allow them to make the jump. It was just going to take a lot of hard work.

Lately I’ve decided that I’ve been wrong. It turns out that there is one thing that any negotiator can do that will allow him or her to move up to the next level. This secret turns out to be something that all of us should be doing anyway. In fact I think that it should really be part of the negotiation definition: planning the negotiation.

Negotiating Is Dynamic, Why Bother To Plan?

Nobody could possibly object to the idea of creating a plan to guide your actions during a negotiating session, right? If this is what you think, then you’d be wrong. I get a lot of push back from my clients when I suggest this.

What they tell me is that they view negotiations as being a dynamic thing. They don’t think that a plan will do them any good – it will quickly become useless and so why waste the time creating one in the first place?

I have a saying that I share with my clients when they say this: plan your work, work your plan, and it will all work out. Yes, a lot of things that you can’t possibly anticipate may happen during a negotiation process. However, by having a plan you’ll know where you want to go during the negotiations and you’ll know how you want to get there.

The Best Way To Develop A Negotiating Plan That Will Work

If I’ve been able to convince you that having a plan for your next negotiation is the way to go, then perhaps your next question will be how can you get better at creating plans for negotiating? It turns out that this is actually pretty easy to do.

The first thing that you’ll want to do is to do some role playing. Because of the dynamic nature of negotiating, you’ll never be able to know exactly how the other side is going to react to your proposals. If you can get someone to play the role of the other side of the table, then when you make your proposals you just might be surprised by their reaction. This is a good thing – you can update your plan to take this kind of reaction into account.

Additionally, during the actual negotiations you will want to make sure that you and your team have enough time to make sure that you are staying on plan. This means that you should plan on taking frequent caucus breaks. Only by re-synching with your team will you be able to get your side of the table back onto your plan if things have goon awry.

What All Of This Means For You

All of us want to become better negotiators. We spend a lot of time researching new negotiation styles and negotiating techniques; however, it turns out that one of the most powerful ways to become better has been under our noses all along: practice planning. It’s so simple that we’ve overlooked it for too long.

Sometimes a negotiation seems to be too dynamic. I mean how could you ever hope to plan for something that changes that much? However, it turns out that by having a plan, you’ll always know where you want to go and how you’ll get there.

In order to make sure that your plan will work for you, you can take the extra step and do some role playing before the actual negotiations start. By doing this you can adjust your plan so that it accounts for the actions that you believe that the other side may take.

Having a plan gives you something that every negotiator needs before a principled negotiation starts: self-confidence. If you know what you want and how you’re going to get it, then there’s a much better chance that what you’ve negotiated is going to end up producing a good deal for both sides.

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

Question For You: How much time do you think that you should spend creating a plan for your next sales negotiation?

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

The goal of any negotiation is to get the other side of the table to see things your way. Hmm, how are we going to make that happen? What you are going to have to do is to become skilled at finding ways to support the position that you are taking. In order to get better at doing this, I’ve got 5 tips that will boost your skills…

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Sales Negotiators Know That The Devil Is In The Details

Friday, January 20th, 2012
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The devil is in how you set up the negotiating room …

The devil is in how you set up the negotiating room …

What is it going to take to make your next sales negotiation work out the way that you want it to? Do you need to go buy a bunch of negotiating books to learn the latest negotiation styles or negotiating techniques? Do you need to bring in a hired gun? Or maybe all it will take is something so simple that it often gets overlooked – setting up the negotiating room correctly?

Sometimes It’s All About The Supplies

I know that you’d like to have a talk about the best way to seize and hold onto power in your next negotiation. However, long before you get to the point where you need to worry about who has the power, you first need to make sure that the room that you’ll be negotiating in is going to help you to reach the deal that you want to reach. It may not be a part of the negotiation definition, but it probably should be.

Although we generally focus the most on the details surrounding the actual negotiations themselves, it turns out that we really need to expand our thinking. What I’m saying here is that we need to spend some time thinking about lunch. And maybe dinner.

Studies have shown that we humans don’t do well if we try to work for long periods of time without taking a break. This holds true when we are negotiating. That means that both lunch and dinner breaks are necessary. That means that the big question is how are you going to get your hands on these meals? Will everyone go offsite? Will you have the meals brought in? It’s always important that both sides of the table can go off and eat by themselves – this is when some of the most important strategy work gets done.

Knowledge Is Power

It has always been my opinion that a negotiation is simply a specialized form of communication. What this means is that you need to find ways to grab and hold on to the other side of the table’s attention.

The room that you choose to negotiate in needs to help you to do this. Don’t let the layout of the room or how it forces people in it to sit to take attention away from the material that you’ll be presenting.

Which leads to my next point: make sure that you have everything that you need to make your presentation. Don’t plan on showing up and just presenting some PowerPoint slides. Assume that things will be unclear to the other side. Assume that you’ll end up having discussions about how your proposal can be modified to make it acceptable to the other side.

If this is going to happen, then you are going to have to be prepared. This means that you need to take the time to make sure that you’ll have all of the supplies that you’ll need before the negotiations begin: whiteboards, blackboards, markers, paper, copy machines, etc.

Finally, what does the lighting in the room look like? If it’s not up to the task, you and everyone else are going to find yourself in the dark – literally! Visit the site before the negotiations start and make sure that both the lighting and any audio systems are going to help, not hinder, your next negotiation.

One final note that I almost hesitate to bring up. However, it’s been an issue more times than I care to admit. Make sure that everyone involved in the negotiations knows where to go. All too often busy people make assumptions about where the negotiations will be held and they end up showing up at the wrong location – perhaps even the wrong city!

What All Of This Means For You

As negotiators it can be all too easy to get lost when we are looking for a way to make our next negotiation process work out the way that we want it to. This idea is a great idea; however, all too often we end up focusing on the wrong things. Instead, as part of conducting a principled negotiation, we should spend some time thinking about how the room that we’ll be negotiating in will be set up.

Things that we need to keep an eye on include making sure that when breaks occur, there are places to eat nearby. Making sure that it will be easy for both sides to focus on the material being presented as well as making sure that everything that you’ll need in order to explain positions and document your progress is available. Finally, make sure that everyone knows where the negotiations will be held – don’t waste time waiting for people to show up!

In negotiations, as in life, more often than not it’s the little things that determine how what we’ve negotiated turns out in the end. If you take the time to make sure that where your next negotiation is going to be held is set up to support you, then you’ll be that much closer to successfully reaching a deal.

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

Question For You: What do you think is better – eating onsite or going offsite for meals while negotiating?

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

When I’m working with negotiators who are trying to become better, they always ask me what the secret to moving to the next level is. For years I always told them that there was no “silver bullet” that would allow them to make the jump. It was just going to take a lot of hard work.

Lately I’ve decided that I’ve been wrong. It turns out that there is one thing that any negotiator can do that will allow him or her to move up to the next level. This secret turns out to be something that all of us should be doing anyway. In fact I think that it should really be part of the negotiation definition: planning the negotiation.

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5 Tips For Selecting The Right Location To Negotiate In

Friday, January 13th, 2012
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The outcome of your negotiation may depend on where you are meeting

The outcome of your negotiation may depend on where you are meeting

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.

Who’s Where And Why?

You are a busy, successful negotiator. You don’t have time to worry about such trivial things as what room you’ll be conducting your negotiations in. You need to be spending your time worrying about the things that really matter: researching the other side and picking the negotiation styles and negotiating techniques that you’ll use.

Hold on a minute, I’m going to tell you that the outcome of your next negotiating session may very well depend on how the room that you negotiate in is set up. This item should be part of the negotiation definition. Now do I have your attention? Let’s start with the simple things, like the chair that you’ll be sitting in.

The other side is going to have a leg up on you if you are distracted for any reason. A great way to do this is to set the room up so that you find yourself sitting in a distinctly uncomfortable chair. You might think that this is a trivial issue, but that’s the point – it will irritate you just enough to keep you off of your game and give more power to the other side.

There’s another angle to this technique. We all love those rooms that have floor to ceiling glass walls that allow you to look outside. What we tend to forget is that at the start and the end of the day, the sun will be shining in through those very windows. When this happens, if your chair has been situated so that you are looking out of the windows, you’ll be staring directly into the rising or setting sun. This will throw you off of your game very quickly!

Since most of us don’t negotiate by ourselves, where the rest of our team is sitting is very important. What we want to do is to make sure that everyone who is on your team is seated so that they can maintain eye contact with each other. So much of what goes on during a negotiation is subtitle that this type of ability to communicate is critical. Likewise, ensuring that you match up different roles with the other side across the table (executive to executive, legal to legal, etc.) can significantly help with communications.

It All About So Much More Than Just The Room

So now that we have where you and your team will be sitting all taken care of, we’re done with this room stuff, right? Well no, there’s still the issue of picking the actual room itself.

What you want to do here is to make sure that the size of the room matches the number of people who will be participating in the negotiations. This means that a very large room is not suitable for a small negotiating party and likewise a small room won’t suit the needs of a large group of negotiators.

It turns out that you need to worry about more than just the room that you’ll be negotiating in. You also need to make sure that other rooms are available to be used by both sides of the table. We all know how negotiations go – it’s not always what gets discussed at the “big table” in front of everyone that helps you get to a deal, but rather the smaller discussions that happen offline that will help resolve issues and allow you to make progress.

What All Of This Means For You

In a principled negotiation, as with all such things in life, it’s the little things that end up making all of the difference. One of the biggest of the little things are the decisions that get made about the room that you’ll be conducting your negotiations in.

It’s a 1,000 little things about the room that can have an impact on your ability to reach the deal that you want. You need to make sure that you’ll have a comfortable chair, that you won’t be staring into the sun, and that both your team and the other side are correctly seated at the negotiating table.

Once you have the room taken care of, you need to make sure that the rest of your negotiating environment also meets your needs. This includes making sure that the size of the room that you’ll be using matches the size of the teams that will be negotiating: not too big, not too small. Finally, you’ll need to make sure that you have additional rooms available so that both sides can have those all so important side meetings.

As a negotiator you are responsible for making sure that the time and energy that you put into any deal that you’ve negotiated yields results. One way to help this happen correctly is to take the time to make sure that the negotiating room meets your needs. Take care of this detail, and the room will take care of you.

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

Question For You: What do you think that you should do if you’ve started the negotiations and you discover something wrong with the room?

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 is it going to take to make your next sales negotiation work out the way that you want it to? Do you need to go buy a bunch of negotiating books to learn the latest negotiation styles or negotiating techniques? Do you need to bring in a hired gun? Or maybe all it will take is something so simple that it often gets overlooked – setting up the negotiating room correctly?

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Sales Negotiators Need To Learn Their History Lesson

Friday, November 4th, 2011
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Taking notes is an important part of learning from a negotiation

Taking notes is an important part of learning from a negotiation

When you sit down at the negotiating table with the other side, what’s running through your mind? Are you wondering what they are thinking? Are you wondering what negotiating techniques they will use? If you have studied your history lesson, then you’ll already know the answers to these questions.

History Is Always Repeated In Negotiations

There really is no excuse for not knowing the negotiation styles practiced by the other side before you sit down at the negotiating table. Everybody has a history and with a little digging, you can learn a great deal.

The easiest case is if the other side has done business with your firm in the past. There should be a history of the negotiations that they have done with you: what they bought, what they paid, who they negotiated with in the past, and any problems or issues that came up during those negotiations.

History comes along with both sides of the table: their side and yours. You arrive with a resume that consists of your practicing principled negotiation with other companies. This can be incredibly powerful as a set of current references to support you during this negotiation. You can always refer to the deals that you’ve negotiated in the past to show that you’ve negotiated successful deals in the past that benefited both sides of the table.

You Can Only Pass Your History Test If You Take Good Notes

The key to maximizing the value of each negotiation that you are involved in is to realize that you are really setting the stage for your next negotiation with this party. That means that you’re going to have to take good notes.

History does repeat itself and nowhere else is this clearer than during the negotiation process. If you’ve taken good notes the last time that you were involved in negotiations with this company, then you’ll be able to anticipate each move during the negotiation.

In order to prepare for the next time that you meet the other side of the table, you need to spend time after the current negotiation wraps up documenting what happed during the negotiation. You can think of this as being a sort of negotiation definition — it will tell you how the next time will go. You should document such things as what kind of demands the other side made as well as how they went about making concessions.

What All Of This Means For You

There is no excuse for going into your next negotiation without having a good understanding of who you are going to be up against. There should be enough of a past history of negotiations that the other side has been involved in to allow you to build a good understanding of their negotiating style.

The burden of creating a history of the other side also falls on your shoulders. After you complete a negotiation with them, you have to write down good notes about how the process went. These notes are both for you and for any other negotiator that has to go up against them in the future.

There is the saying that “knowledge is power”. Nowhere is this more true than in negotiations. The nice thing is that with some history collection efforts on your part, you can gather the knowledge that you’ll need in order to more quickly reach a successful deal!

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

Question For You: How much time do you think that you should invest in researching the other side of the table’s negotiating history?

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

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to take on responsibility for a negotiation that might not be a success? I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – our company’s negotiators who are perfect are rewarded while negotiators who fail are kicked to the curb. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

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Sales Negotiators Need To Be Good Pressure Thinkers

Friday, March 4th, 2011
Image Credit Good sales negotiators know how to think under pressure

Good sales negotiators know how to think under pressure

Let’s face it: a sales negotiation is a high-pressure situation. With all that is expected of you, thinking clearly can be a challenge even for the best of us. That’s why the best sales negotiators have developed a whole series of techniques that allow them the time that they need to do a good job of thinking under pressure…

It Takes A Village To Think Under Pressure

As sales negotiators, we think pretty highly of ourselves. When it comes to making decisions under pressure, however, we’re no better than the next guy. That’s why when we have the option, we should never go it alone.

Instead, when we attend a sales negotiation we should always bring along someone else from our team, and more if we can get away with it. The thinking here is pretty simple. By having multiple people on your team, you’ll have an excuse for everything to take longer. You’ll need to discuss things, come to a consensus, look things up, etc.

All of these activities take time. This is time that you can use to think about the current negotiating situation and make decisions about what you want to do next. It does seem to slow down the overall negotiations; however, this extra time is exactly what you need in order to be able to make good decisions under pressure.

It’s Recess Time (Again)!

Nobody ever said that you needed to sit down at the negotiating table and not get up again until you’ve reached a deal with the other side. In fact, you are probably not going to be happy with the deal that you agree to if you negotiate this way.

Instead, a better way of doing things is to take frequent breaks throughout the negotiations. Every time you take a break, use the time to go over your notes, think about how you want to respond to what has been said by the other side, and perhaps even adjust your strategy.

It’s my opinion that you can’t take too many breaks during a negotiation. If the other side really wants to strike a deal with you, they’ll have to go along with all of your break requests. The more time that you have to think, the better the final deal that you’ll be able reach.

The Long Pause

Rare is the sales negotiation that can be completed in a single day. This opens an opportunity for you to buy yourself more time to make better decisions.

Take a look at the calendar before the negotiations start. Are there any natural breaks that are going to occur during the negotiations: a meal, the end of the day, a weekend, a holiday, etc.? Once you’ve identified such a break, use it to your advantage.

Suggest an agenda that will result in the other side using the available time to lay out their position. You want them to use up all of the available time. Feel free to ask questions about the material that they are presenting in order to ensure that there is no time left over.

When you reach the natural breaking point, suggest that the break be taken and that you’ll respond to what has been presented after the break. By doing this you ensure that you’ll have the maximum amount of time to consider what the other side has presented and you’ll be able to make your best decisions – not under pressure!

What All Of This Means For You

Top sales negotiators know that in order to get the best deal possible, they are going to have to do a good job of thinking under pressure. The trick to doing this well is to set things up so that you have the time that you need to make good decisions.

In order to provide yourself with the time that you’ll need, make sure that you bring people with you to your next negotiation. Once there, don’t be afraid to take many breaks – these allow you time to think and change your strategy. Finally, schedule the negotiation so that you have the maximum amount of time after the other side has presented their position before you have to respond to it.

By allowing yourself enough time to think about what your next move is going to be, no matter how much pressure you are under, you will always come out of a negotiation in a better position. The key to long-term negotiating success is to find ways to provide yourself with enough time to make the correct decisions. Now you know how to do this!

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

Question For You: How long do you think you should spend negotiating before you call your next break?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When we start a sales negotiation, we have certain expectations about how it’s going to go. If we’re selling something, then we believe that the other side will state what they are interested in buying, we’ll have some discussions and we’ll eventually provide them with a proposal. We then expect them to react to the proposal and that’s when the real negotiating starts. However, what happens if they don’t react at all…?

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