Posts Tagged ‘Japanese’

2 “Never Fail” Secrets To Getting Your Way In A Sales Negotiation

Friday, May 21st, 2010
Image Credit Sometimes The Shortest Words Are The Most Powerful

Sometimes The Shortest Words Are The Most Powerful

Hey, did you read any of those Harry Potter books (or at least see one of the movies?) If you did, then you probably got drawn into the world of magic and wizards that the books are all about. It sure seems as though in these stories that there is a magic portion or a curse to do just about anything. The stories are fiction but it turns out that sales negotiators do have some real magic that they can use to get what they want during a negotiation…

The Power Of The Word “No”

For some odd reason in Western cultures there seems to be a social stigma associated with saying the word “no” to someone – even when we’re in the middle of a sales negotiation. If you want to be successful, you’re going to have to learn to get over this hang up.

I’m not talking about just saying “no” and then turning your back to the other side of the table. Instead, I’m going to suggest a two-part “no” strategy. The first part, naturally, consists of you saying “no”. The second part is where you take the time to explain to the other side of the table WHY you said no. The goal here is to explain your reasoning in a clear and logical fashion.

One of the reasons that so many of us really dislike saying (or sticking with ) a “no” is because we think that it’s going to make the other side of the table feel bad. What’s interesting about this is that more often than not, we’re wrong about this.

Getting a “no” from us might be exactly what the other side of the table wants. It closes the door on this part of the negotiation and so they can move on to the next part. If asked by their bosses, they can at least say that they asked and we said “no”.

In the world of negotiating, just about everyone agrees that the Japanese are the best at saying “no” . They have a way of saying it in such a way that you don’t feel bad when you hear it: “yes, but …” or “no, maybe…”.

Give Them An Opportunity To Vent

Just how do you think your response of a “no” is going to make the other side of the table feel? Sad? Angry? You bet! When they are feeling this way they are going to want to vent, let off some steam. If you are wise, you’ll go ahead and let them do this.

The reasoning behind this strategy is subtle, but complex. By allowing the other side to go on a rant, you are deliberately not restricting their actions. If you tried to do this they just might go postal and storm out of the negotiations. By allowing them to do some yelling, you are providing them with a safe way to work through their frustrations.

Another point that you should keep in mind is that when the other side is venting, they may actually be showing off for the rest of their team. Remember that when the sales negotiations are done, they are going to have to report to their bosses who will ask if they did everything that they could in order to get the best deal possible. Reports of their tirade may serve to convince their internal audience that they did a good job.

What All Of This Means For You

Forget the magic that Harry Potter is able to call upon, today’s sales negotiators need to find some practical magic. The good news is that there seems to be plenty of it around for us to use.

The simple word “no” can be the one word that allows you to get what you want during your next sales negotiation. You just need to find the courage to say it and stick with it. Once you’ve said it, you’ll need to give the other side of the table a chance to work out their frustration.

If you can do both of these things, then you’ll be that much closer to striking a good deal during your next negotiation. Who can say “no” to that?

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Help For Technical Staff

Question For You: Once you’ve said “no” to something, do you think that you can ever change you mind and say “yes” to it without losing face?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In the world of negotiating, the actual process of negotiating is very much an art. In order to be good at it, a master sales negotiator needs to have a complete collection of negotiating tactics at his or her disposal…

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The Power Of Time In A Sales Negotiation

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
If You Control Time, Then You Control The Negotiation

If You Control Time, Then You Control The Negotiation

When I work with clients to improve their negotiating skills, one of the first things that we do is to sit down and review their past experiences with negotiating situations. This generally produces a list of both good and bad experiences. The reason that I take the time to do this is because it shows me where things have gone wrong in the past and where my customers need to spend the most time developing their negotiating skills.

Time after time the same weakness shows up in my clients. No matter how confident they may feel about a negotiation or how much research they’ve done going in, the issue of available time seems to trip them up over and over again.

How The Japanese Used Time To Their Advantage

In the early 1980′s U.S. businesses “rediscovered” Japan and almost every business wanted to strike a deal with a Japanese business in order to get access to high quality, low cost goods. What this meant is that a lot of U.S. business men (and women) got on planes and flew over to Japan to do some sales negotiating.

It quickly became apparent that the Japanese were excellent negotiators. The Americans were coming home with signed business deals that were ok, but nothing close to what they had originally been hoping for.

It turns out that the Japanese were not only good negotiators, but they also knew how to read an airline’s flight schedule. The Japanese would find out when the Americans were scheduled to fly home and they would stall during the negotiations until it got close to the time for the Americans to leave for the airport.

The Americans would be desperate to close a deal and would end up giving too much away just to be able to make their flight. After this had been going on for awhile, one American took the time to step back and study how negotiations were going with the Japanese. He quickly discovered what they were doing and how they were doing it.

The next time that he was scheduled to negotiate in Japan with the Japanese, he found out when the Japanese that he would be negotiating with were scheduled to take the train home. He went ahead and made two flight reservations – one before their train left, and one afterwards. Once the negotiations started, he stalled and the Japanese couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t getting worried about missing his flight. After he had missed the window to leave the negotiations for his flight, he started to get serious about negotiating. Now it was time for the Japanese to start to get nervous , they were worried about missing their train back to Tokyo. In the end, they ended up making too many concessions.

Seven Ideas To Build Your Time Power

One of the fundamental lessons that I include in all of my training sessions with my clients is that time is a crucial element when it comes to bargaining power. What it all comes down to is one simple rule: the more time that I have, and the less time that you have, then the more negotiating power I will have.

Now of course, the key to making sure that you have more time during a negotiation is to take action to ensure that you have the time that you need. Here are seven ways that you can ensure that you’ll have the time that you need:

  • Leave time to shop around , You may be negotiating with the wrong people sitting on the other side of the table. You may decide to go searching for someone else to do a deal with. If this happens, it’s going to take some time and so you’re going to need to have enough time to do that search.
  • Be on time for the meeting , This seems like a silly thing to say, but you’d be amazed at how many people don’t do it. If you show up for a negotiation late, then you are going to be running behind during the entire discussion. Being there on time will help you get started in a relaxed way.
  • Give yourself time to think , Don’t let the other side push you into making a decision that might be the wrong decision for you. Instead, call for periodic breaks and give yourself some thinking time in order to reassess where things stand and what your next steps should be.
  • Avoid marathon talks , Death marches will only end up killing you. No matter how “cool” it might be to tell your boss that you were in negotiations for 8, 10, 12 hours straight the sad reality is that your performance drops off over time. The one exception to this rule is that if you are pleased with where things currently stand and you’d like to push on to the end in order to wrap things up.
  • Pick the best time to negotiate , They always say that there is a time for everything and negotiating is no exception to this rule. Are you a morning person or an evening person? Know your preference and schedule your negotiating sessions accordingly.
  • Leave time for things to go wrong , This one is huge. Things will never go according to your plan. You need to anticipate that things that you could never have counted on will happen, points that you though both sides agreed to before discussions stared will turn out to be significant issues, etc. Leave time to work all of these things out.
  • Leave enough time to plan , So often my clients will think that planning is something that you only do before you start a negotiation. It turns out that you do do it before, but you also do it during the negotiation in order to adjust to events that unfold during the negotiation.
  • Leave enough time to negotiate with your second choice – If things don’t go the way that you want them to with the other side of the table, make sure that you’ll still have enough time to negotiate with another partner. There is no worse feeling than knowing that you have to stick with a bad negotiation because you don’t have any other alternatives.

Final Thoughts

All too often time starts to cause you to make hurried decisions because you have a real or an imagined deadline looming. When that happens, stop, take a deep breath and then ask yourself the following three questions in order to find ways to relieve the pressure of that deadline:

  1. What self-imposed or organization-imposed deadlines am I under?
  2. Are the deadlines that I’m under real?
  3. What deadlines are putting pressure on the other side?

One of the most important points to remember about time and deadlines in a negotiation is that you may not the only one under pressure, the other side may be under greater pressure than you.

If you can learn to make time work for you during your next negotiation, then you will be able to close better deals and close them quicker.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What is the secret for walking away from your next sales negotiation feeling satisfied? We all wish that there was some magic “silver bullet” technique that if we knew what it was we could use it every time we negotiate in order to be able to walk away feeling like our negotiating time was well spent. It turns out that there is such a technique, and it’s called doing your homework.

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Japanese Sales Negotiation Secrets

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Sales Negotiations With Japanese Partners Require New Skills

Sales Negotiations With Japanese Partners Require New Skills

All too often Americans (like me) think that we know everything. The reality is that our society has only been around for a bit over 200 years and we’re just getting started. That’s why it can be valuable for a sales negotiator to take a look at how societies that have been around for 1,000′s of years negotiate. Like, say, Japan…

The U.S. really started to take a look at how we dealt Japan in the 1980′s when trade between our countries exploded. What people quickly realized is that both sides of the table were fundamentally different. There for the first decade or so, U.S. sales negotiators were getting taken to the bank more often than not because the Japanese sales negotiators were doing a better job.

Over time HOW these negotiations were being conducted was closely studied. Three techniques quickly became apparent:

  1. Considered Response / Respectful Silence: when Japanese sales negotiators are on the other side of the table, be prepared to sit quietly. Western sales negotiators don’t know what to do when nobody is talking – and the Japanese know this. They can sit, work out math problems, draw in long breaths, etc. and say nothing for minutes at a time. This is all designed to get you to become flustered and give in on a point or say something that you shouldn’t say.
  2. KAN – “Seeking Heavenly Approval”: Western sales negotiators like to focus on the here and now. Japanese sales negotiators realize that this deal is just part of a much bigger relationship. After the details of the agreement have been worked out and it appears as though you are close to closing the deal, members of the Japanese team will pause. They will consider if they really want to do this deal with you – is it going to be worth it in the long run, or are you just going to be too much of a hassle to deal with? This moment is called KAN – reaching “heavenly approval”.
  3. Time & Money: the Japanese view the sales negotiation process differently than their Western partners do. We in the west see it as something to race through and quickly get done with. The Japanese view it as something to be nurtured. They set aside enough time to do it properly. They resist attempts to wrap it up quickly. They will revisit points over and over again in order to test your resolve. This is how Japanese sales negotiators turn time into money.

It is entirely possible to enter into sales negotiations with Japanese partners on the other side of the table and come out with an agreement that you feel good about. However, you need to fully understand how they see the world and adjust your sales negotiating style to this situation.

Have you ever had a chance to negotiate with a Japanese team? Were there long, uncomfortable periods of silence? Did they seem to slow things down and do more thinking as the end of the negotiations approached? Did you remember to budget enough time for the negotiation or did they budget more time than you had? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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