Posts Tagged ‘time’

Negotiating Secrets To Getting The Other Side To See Things Your Way

Friday, April 15th, 2011
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Negotiators Need To Get The Other Side To See Things Their Way

Negotiators Need To Get The Other Side To See Things Their Way

Have you ever changed something about your appearance that made you look dramatically different? How did that go over with your family, friends, and coworkers? I’m willing to bet that right off the bat there was some shock when they first encountered your new look. However, over time that faded and things got back to normal. What happened is that they eventually came around to seeing you the way that you see yourself. When you are negotiating a deal, this same concept can be a powerful factor in helping you to wrap up a negotiation…

The Concept Of Acceptance Time

New ideas take time to be accepted. This is true in real life as well as in negotiations. If you are the one bringing a new idea to a negotiation, such as a price increase, or a shorter time in which you need to receive a product, then you need to expect the other side of the table to push back on the idea when you present it.

Acceptance time is the time that it takes for one party in a negotiation to accept a new idea. This acceptance does not come quickly. Instead, people need time in order to become used to a new set of circumstances.

The reason that acceptance time is such an important part of every negotiation is because we all enter into a negotiation with a mental list of things that we want to get out of the negotiation. When the other side presents us with a demand that does not sit well with our list of desired outcomes, we struggle to reconcile what we want with what is being offered to us.

Our perception of reality is initially shaped by ourselves. As the other side of the table reshapes this perception, we need to adjust and this takes time. This is especially true if the new ideas that the other side is presenting are unpleasant to us.

As negotiators we need to realize that new ideas will become old ideas and ideas that were considered to be completely unacceptable when they were initially presented can become possible once they’ve been on the table long enough. Allowing the concept of acceptance time to work its magic can allow the other side of the table to come around to our way of seeing the world and will make it possible to reach a deal with them.

What All Of This Means For You

Ultimately a negotiation is all about presenting the other side of the table with new ideas. You should expect these new ideas to encounter a lot of resistance when they are first presented.

However, the powerful concept of acceptance time has the ability to transform the negotiation. What was once completely unacceptable when you first presented it, can become understandable and then acceptable if you allow enough time to pass.

Skilled negotiators realize that this is a natural process that can be a part of every negotiation. Using this knowledge they both present new ideas early on in the process and then allow enough time to pass so that the other side can become comfortable with the new ideas. Use the power of acceptance time to allow a deal to be reached no matter how new your proposals are.

- 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: At what time in a negotiation do you think that you should present your new proposals that you know will cause pushback?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you are getting ready for your next negotiation, you might want to spend some time thinking about the most important item that you need to make sure that is in order. I’m not talking about your notes, the location of the negotiations, or even the strategy that you’ve mapped out for the negotiations. What I’m talking about it the time of day at which the negotiations will be held. It turns out that this may be the single most important factor in determining how the negotiations turn out…

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Sales Negotiators Know The True Power Of Picking The Right Time To Negotiate

Friday, March 18th, 2011
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Time Plays A Critical Role In Every Sales Negotiation

Time Plays A Critical Role In Every Sales Negotiation

Professional sales negotiators know that time plays a role in every sales negotiation. In this case we’re not talking about how much time a given negotiation takes, but rather when you start a negotiation and just exactly what that is going to lead to…

Why Time Matters

So what’s the big deal about time? As sales negotiators we’ve all been taught that how long we spend negotiating with the other side of the table is a key strategic issue – strange things can start to happen the longer you go on talking. However, one thing that is never discussed is just how important WHEN you start to negotiate is.

What this really gets down to is the simple fact that there is both a right time and a wrong time to start a negotiation. Good sales negotiators are always aware of this and realize that effectively time has a way of communicating all of its own that you need to know how to understand and speak.

A good example of the power of time is when you realize that there are certain calendar dates such as the arrival of the Christmas holidays, the end of the calendar year, and even the day that we have to pay taxes (April 15 in the United States). The proximity of the negotiations to one of these dates can help a deal to be reached much quicker.

Taking the idea of time to the next level, you need to realize that there will be times when a seller has a large inventory of products, there are times when a vendor is either very busy or very slow, there are also times when new products are being prepared to be introduced and so vendors may be eager to deal on their existing inventory.

How You Can Make Time Work For You

Professional sales negotiators realize that time is an important part of any sales negotiation and they work it into their strategy for reaching a successful deal. One part of this planning is to never let the other side dictate what time a negotiation starts. Consider when they want to start and then suggest a time that works better for you.

Once a negotiation has started, you must realize that keeping an awareness of time is still important. Just as when you started the negotiation was important, so too is when you decide to make an offer to the other side.

Concessions will always be made during a sales negotiation. However, you control when those concessions will be made. If you make a concession too early in a negotiation, then you’ll potentially be sending a signal to the other side of the table that you’re going to be willing to make a lot more concessions during the negotiations.

To take this consideration of time during a negotiation one step further, making an offer to the other side to early on or rejecting their offer and presenting a counteroffer too quickly may send a signal of desperation to the other side. Taking the time to allow enough discussion to occur before making (or rejecting) such offers places you in a much stronger position.

What All Of This Means For You

It turns out that time really does matter. Professional sales negotiators know that time can control the outcome of a negotiation. The time that the clock shows can control when or even if a decision is going to be made.

Sales negotiators know to take a look at not only where a negotiation is going to occur, but also when. Being aware of the time of day, week, month, and year as well as what this may mean for the other side is the key to making time work for you.

Everything matters when you are negotiating. Time is one such thing. Negotiators who are aware of what time it is and what this may mean to the other side of the table are the ones who always seem to reach the best deals…

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

Question For You: When do you think would be the wrong time to start a sales negotiation?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The goal of every sales negotiation is to reach a deal that is agreeable to both sides. The question is just how much time should you take in order to get there? The classic question that all sales negotiators are always trying to answer is if it is better to negotiate in short sessions with long breaks or in long sessions with short breaks?

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Stand Your Ground: Two Ways To Not Fold During A Sales Negotiation

Friday, April 30th, 2010
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In Order To Defend Your Side Of A Negotiation, Always Have An Exit

In Order To Defend Your Side Of A Negotiation, Always Have An Exit

So there you are: the classic sales negotiator in the headlights. You’ve got a firm fixed price that you’ve been told to not budge on and yet you know that you’re getting ready to start a negotiation during which the other side is going to be hammering you to lower your price. Sure doesn’t make you want to get up early in the morning, does it?

Rule #1: Slow Down

When I’m working with clients who have a technical background, the question of how fast to move during a negotiation often comes up. Specifically, if you think that the price that you are asking for is going to be a big bone of contention, then should you just cut to the chase and start talking about price right off the bat?

Interestingly enough, and somewhat counter intuitively, the answer is no. If you jump to talking about the issue that you think is the most important, then you’ve lost an important opportunity to find out what the other side of the table thinks is the most important issue – and it may not be the same thing that you are worried about.

Taking your time also gives you a chance to gauge the other side of the table’s interest in the overall negotiation. If they need to get this deal done and move on to other things, then there may really be no sticking points at all if you don’t bring them up.

Finally, by taking time to get around to a major issue in the negotiations you are sending a signal to the other side of the table. Specifically, you are telling them that you are not all that anxious about this negotiation and that you won’t be caving in to their demands.

Rule #2: It’s All About Your Exit Plan

If you are going to look the other side of the table in the eye and tell them that your price is the best price that they are going to get from you, then you’d better be ready to back that statement up. This means that you’re going to have to have done your homework if you want to have an exit plan that will allow you to avoid having the negotiations end in a wreck.

Why are you charging the price that you are charging? Is your price as good as anyone else’s? Prove it. Is it based on what you charged this customer last time they bought from you? Prove it.

Your goal here is to boost the credibility of your price in the eyes of the other side of the negotiating table. The more that you’re able to do this, the better the odds are that you’ll eventually be able to get them to agree to doing a deal with you.

There is one additional side benefit to doing your homework and providing a solid backing for the price that you are asking. If in the end you find yourself having to make some sort of concession, no matter how small, on your price, then having presented a solid case for the price will end the discussion. The evidence that you provided should stop the other side from asking for even more concessions.

What All Of This Means For You

Starting a negotiation when you know that you you’ve got to defend a price that will be coming under heavy assault from the other side of the table is never fun. However, it is possible to be successful if you’ve done your homework before the negotiations begin.

Speed kills in a negotiation. Don’t dive in and start talking about the most challenging part of the negotiation right off the bat. Instead let the other side drive the discussion and find out what’s important to them. Also always have the facts to back up your price – it will make your job that much easier.

It is possible to come out of a negotiation with your price intact. All it takes is the good sense to take it slow and to come prepared to explain why your price is one that the other side is going to be willing to live with.

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should ever bring up a negation point, or should you always leave this to the other side to do?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, so it’s time to get down and dirty about this sales negotiating stuff. Time after time I keep seeing sales negotiators making the same two mistakes over and over again and it just has got to stop. You can build the best product in the world, have the best sales team, but if you keep dropping the ball when it comes to negotiating the sale, then it’s all for naught…

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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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3 Secrets Successful Sales Negotiators Use To Win

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
3 Secrets That Top Sales Negotiators Know

3 Secrets That Top Sales Negotiators Know

Ok, so I’ll be the first to admit it – I used the forbidden word “win” in the title. In sales negotiations we prefer to not say “win” because it implies that there is also a “loser”. and that’s not a good thing. How about if we try something like “3 secrets to always walking away feeling successful“?

It’s All About Patterns

Successful sales negotiators are good at what they do because they know what they are doing. That being said, they also have developed patterns for conducting sales negotiations that serve them well. If you want to improve how your sales negotiations turn out, then taking the time to study these patterns will help move you towards your goal.

The 3 Secrets

  1. Control Your Location & Time: Just like most sports teams, the sales negotiator who conducts a negotiation on his / her home turf tends to do better. Negotiating at your base of operations makes life easier – you have better access to information and people and you spend less time searching for things that you need to complete the deal. Additionally, although there is no one perfect time to conduct sales negotiations, every deal has its own best time. Late on Fridays can often be a powerful time to close a deal quickly!
  2. Understand Your B.A.T.A.N.A?: Before you start any sales negotiation, you need to make sure that you have a good understanding of what your Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement (BATANA) is. If the talks break down, what will your next action be? Knowing this in advance gives you more power while you are negotiating.
  3. Start High, Give In Slowly: If you are negotiating to sell something, you need to plan the negotiation in advance. This means setting your price high enough so that you have room to allow the other side to “bring you down”. During every negotiation, you will have to make  concessions to the other side. Studies have shown that sales negotiators who make their concessions in smaller increments seem to end up doing better.

Next Steps

The art of sales negotiations does not have one magic “sliver bullet” that suddenly transforms an average sales negotiator into a top-notch sales negotiator. Instead, there are a 1,000 negotiating skills that provide the scaffolding that we all need in order to climb to the next level negotiating. Get this right and you’ll be well on your way to being able to close better deals and close them quicker.
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The Accidental Negotiator Blog is updated.

Questions For You

Have you ever had to conduct a sales negotiation in a location that was less than ideal for you? How did that deal turn out? What was the best time that you ever conducted a sales negotiation? What was the worst? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Wouldn’t it be great if the best sales negotiators in the world could drop by our place and sit down with us for awhile to share what they’ve learned? If you knew that they were coming, what questions would you ask them?

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