Archive for the ‘success’ Category

The Other Side Of Negotiation: Persuasion

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Persuasion is the other side of negotiation

The last time that I went into an auto dealership to buy a car, I was smart enough to keep my eyes open. Because I realized that I was entering into a negotiating “combat zone”, I wanted to see what the dealer would do to prepare me for the inevitable pricing discussions that we were going to be having. Although I came ready to negotiate, what I discovered is that even before we began to talk, the dealer was trying to persuade me to buy a car there. Suddenly the light turned on for me – there’s a whole dimensional to this negotiating stuff that I had not realized was there…

The ultimate goal of any negotiation is to convince the other side to do what you want them to do: sell you the car, buy your house, give you a job, sign the contract, etc. We’ve spent some time talking about what I like to call “classical negotiating”. This includes preparing to negotiate, planning on what you are going to compromise on, and even how to deal with demands and deadlines. Now it’s time to talk about the other side of the coin: persuasion.

Persuasion is one of those words that we all know, but would be hard pressed to define. To put it simply, persuasion is a form of social influence in which one party guides another party to a conclusion or action. This is accomplished by appealing to the other party’s needs and wants instead of forcing them to do something. If taken too far, then persuasion can turn into manipulation where only one party benefits from the interaction.

Why take the time to talk about persuasion when we really should be talking about negotiation? Simple, the two forms of communication are different sides to the same coin. I like to think about persuasion as being the unspoken part of negotiation. In a perfect world, if you could persuade the other side to sell you the car, buy your house, sign the contract, then that would be all that was needed. However, often times persuasion is not enough, and that’s when negotiation comes in to play. No matter how things turn out, persuasion has a role to play before, during, and after a negotiation.

When communicating with the other side, there are two basic forms of persuasion that can be used: logical and emotional. It’s important to realize that both forms are often used together – this is not an either or situation. The logical appeal attempts to use facts, logic, and reason to convince the other party to agree to take some action. The emotional appeal attempts to capture the other side’s imagination, their heart, or simply to appeal to their belief system to achieve the same thing.

Back to that car dealer. The walls of the dealership were covered with facts & stats about the safety and gas mileage of the cars that I was looking at (logical). They had pictures up around the place of past customers with little hand written notes that thanked the dealership for their service and support (emotional/social). Finally, when I sat down with the salesman to talk about pricing, I couldn’t help but notice the oversized picture of his wife and children that was prominently displayed on his desk (emotional). Next time you get ready to negotiate, don’t forget to prepare for the other 50% of your task – persuasion!

Do you use persuasion as a part of your negotiations? Have you ever felt as though the other side was using it on you? Have you ever been manipulated by someone during a negotiation? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in communications, emotional, ideas, logical, persuasion, success | 8 Comments »

NASA’s Guide To Negotiation Goal Setting: Aim For The Moon!

Friday, August 15th, 2008

Successful negotiating requires you to set high goals that can be achieved

What does it take to be successful in a negotiation? Long before you start doing any of the standard negotiation preparation tasks, you need to take just a moment and decide where you are aiming to get to. Although it sounds simple, all too often we enter into a negotiation with only a vague understanding of what it’s going to take in order for us to be able to walk away with a feeling of success.

There is a danger to setting an overall goal for the negotiations – how will we feel if we don’t achieve it? Really smart social scientists have been studying things like this for a long time and they’ve learned that setting such a goal will do two things for us: it will form an internal commitment to achieving the goal and it will set us up to feel a sense of ego loss if we end up not achieving it.

Sounds dangerous doesn’t it?

A critical point that you need to realize is that everything that happens at the negotiating table is part of a feedback loop. The feedback that you receive while negotiating will either alter or reinforce your sense of being able to achieve your goal. Those smart scientists have discovered that we respond to the feedback that we’re getting in the following ways:

  • Our expectations of being able to achieve our goal go up after a negotiating success and, of course, they go down after a failure.

  • If we think that we control our own success or failure, then our expectation are even more likely to to go up and down.
  • BIG successes lead to a sense of being able to accomplish our goal; BIG failures leads to a feeling of never being able to accomplish our goal.
  • If your goal is either too easy to get to or too hard to achieve during the negotiations, then you won’t feel much of anything – either success or failure.

If all it took to achieve your overall goal in negotiating was to have a highly placed goal, then we’d all be able to be successful each time we sat down to negotiate. However, life doesn’t work out that way. The reason for this is because of the other side of the table – they are actively working against you!

The other side of the table has a specific set of tactics that they use to bring you down and lower your feeling of being able to accomplish your goal. Their tactics have names such as the Bogey, the Krunch, and the Nibble. If you had no defenses against these tactics, then the other side would win each time. That doesn’t have to be the case and next time we’ll start taking these tactics apart and showing you how you can turn them to your advantage when they are used against you!

Do you always enter a negotiating session with a clear goal in mind? How do you set this goal (or does someone else always set it for you?) Have you ever felt like you were on a rollercoaster during a negotiation: feeling like you were going to achieve your goal one minute and then feeling like it was unreachable the next? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Posted in planning, satisfaction, strategy, strategy development, success | 2 Comments »

Three Secrets That Have Been Missing From Negotiation Training

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Good negotiators use the same secrets to communicate that cheerleaders do

This is going to be a bit of a rant, so I should probably apologize for that in advance.

Over the past 10 years I have have read countless books on negotiating, attended training course after training course, and in the end I was left feeling that something very fundamental was missing — there were secrets to being being a successful negotiator that weren’t being talked about. There is nothing more frustrating than knowing that you don’t know something. I knew that I needed to find somebody who knew these secrets and who would be willing to share them with me.

When in doubt, talk to Sales. So that’s what I did – I started going out on customer visits with every salesperson that would let me tag along. What I saw was that there were good sales people and bad sales people. The good sales people would dive into a negotiation with a customer, tussle about the details, and in the end they would emerge with an agreement that was good for their company and with a satisfied customer no matter what they had gotten or given up. The bad sales people would enter a negotiation as though they were jumping into a street fight, have a knock-down-drag-out with the customer, and finally emerge bruised with a bad agreement and an angry customer. So what were they doing differently?

The bad sales people had clearly gone to the same negotiating classes that I had attended. They used the same negotiating vocabulary that I used and they stepped though a negotiation using the basic steps that I was currently using. They couldn’t really teach me anything. It was the good sales people who held the negotiating secrets that I was looking for.

As I focused on what the good sales people were doing, it very slowly dawned on me that they were being successful because of things that they were doing that weren’t taught in any negotiating course that I had ever taken. This clearly called for some serious beer conversations in order to gain access to these secrets.

Over way too many beers, I was eventually able to tease the answers out of the really good sales people about how they were so successful in negotiating with their customers. At a very high level, what they told me was that I had been missing the other side of the negotiation coin: persuasion. What they said is that negotiating is basically convincing someone to do something. What the bad sales people are missing is the other half of the process: persuading the customer that this is what they want. In fact, if you are good at persuasion then the customer will be falling all over themselves to buy what you have.

As I took all of this in, it started to become clear that what the good sales people were doing could be broken into three main sets of skills:

  • Rapport: they developed a sense of bonding with their customers that allowed the customers to treat them not like “the other side of the table”, but rather like an old friend that they were meeting once again.

  • Body Language: just like a cheerleader, the good sales people realized that in addition to the words that were coming out of their mouths, their bodies were also talking to the customer and they made sure that what their bodies were saying matched what their mouths were saying.
  • Knowing What To Say & When To Say It: the bad sales people always seemed to have periods of awkward silence when they met with customers. The good sales people, on the other hand, always seemed to have something to say and it always seemed to get a positive response out of the customer.

There is a lot more to this persuasion stuff and we’ll talk more about it. However, for now understand that even if you think that you know everything about negotiating, if you don’t have the persuasion skills that you need, then you still have a lot to learn!

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Posted in deals, negotiation, persuasion, sales, success | 12 Comments »

How To Deal With Hard Core Opposition

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Angry Mob Represents Opposition To Your Negotiation

We’ve talked about how to properly prepare to start a negotiation. Once we start to negotiate, thanks to millions of years of evolution, we are all pretty good at recognizing situations in which we are called on to compete. We are tuned to allow us to make ourselves heard in these situations and to get our point across. Which is why we all seem to do such a poor job when we are faced with no competition, but rather opposition. Oh, oh. What to do now?

So what is opposition? Opposition is what happens when the group of people that you are trying to communicate with are just dead set against what you have to say. If you show up in a situation where you are going to be telling your team about a great new documentation system that the company has mandated that everyone will start using, you will encounter opposition if nobody that you are talking to wants to do documentation in the first place — it’s not that the new system is a bad idea (although it might be), it’s just that everyone rejects the idea of doing documentation.

What’s funny is that although in technical fields we struggle with how to deal with opposition, the folks who work in politics deal with it on a daily basis. Our elected officials are forced to deal with opposition everyday and so they have developed effective ways of dealing with it. We could learn a thing or two from them:

  • Co-opt The Other Side’s Issue: this is one of my favorite approaches. Don’t go head-to-head with the oppositon. Instead take a careful look at what’s motivating their position: why doesn’t your team want to do documentation? If you show respect for their underlying issue and then go ahead and propose a different way of solving it, you’ll basically cut off the oppositon at the knees. In our documentation case, if you show the team that offshore developers do a poor job of native language documentation and by doing a good job of documentation their work they will be able to keep more jobs onshore, then you’ve accomplished your co-opting.

  • Redefine The Issue: Initially an issue may start out as a tug-of-war. In order to solve this problem, if you redefine it in such a way that it is no longer a tug-of-war, then you can win the other side over. In our documentation example, the issue could start out as a “the company is telling us to do more work”. This could be redefined as “Other companies have created products that interface with our product. In order for them (and us) to be successful, they have to understand how our product works and so documentation is needed.” All of a sudden, what was something that was being created for the faceless company becomes a tool for specific small business owners.

If you can become skilled at learning to distinguish opposition from competition, then you will have a hard-to-find skill that you can start to use proactively. Do a little bit of research on the group that you will be communicating with. If there is strong opposition to what you will be discussing with them, it will probably come out quickly. Look for ways to co-opt or redefine the issue and you’ll have accomplished half of your job before you even open your mouth.

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Posted in communications, ideas, opposition, planning, success | 2 Comments »