For the past several months, I have provided you with my ten “power negotiating tips” and the rationale behind each one. The tips have worked for me and I hope they assist you in achieving more successful outcomes and establishing longer lasting relationships.
Following is a summary of all we have been discussing. I hope you use the tips in your daily negotiations and I wish you continued success in all of your negotiations.
NEGOTIATING POWER TIPS
DO (The 5 Rʼs)
1. Recognize that everything in life is negotiable.
2. Realize that you only get what you negotiate.
3. Request information; ask open ended questions.
4. Refrain from “splitting the difference” just to make it easy.
5. Read the body language of others.
DONʼT (“GAFFS”)
1. Give something away without getting something in return.
2. Accept the first offer.
3. Fill every void in the conversation.
4. Focus on the person; focus on the “deal.”
5. Set arbitrary deadlines.
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Now for the final “Don’t” or the “S” in GAFFS. Don’t: Set arbitrary deadlines.
There are real deadlines that need to be met in some negotiations, butarbitrary deadlines will weaken your negotiating position. What I mean by arbitrary is taking a position, whether shared with the other party or only in your own mind, that the negotiations must be done by a certain time or date for personal reasons. For example, you have been away from your family for several days and have decided that you want to be home with them next weekend. The deadline may be set by someone else. Your boss could give you an arbitrary completion date just because they want to be able to look good at an upcoming meeting.
Either way you will have an arbitrary deadline or a “drop dead date”. Your willingness to concede on certain points will increase as you approach that deadline, and my best guess is that the other party will soon recognize that you seem to be “caving in.” You will have established a pattern and the other party will take advantage of the circumstance.
In contrast, if you ever have been in a casino, you know there are no clocks anywhere. Why do suppose that is? You think they just forgot, or is there a reason? It is very simple from their perspective. You are not negotiating, you are gambling and time puts the odds in their favor. It is completely opposite to negotiations. When you are gambling, the longer you play the higher the probability you will lose. The casinos do not want you to set arbitrary deadlines because unlike when you are negotiating, it could be better for you to set a time limit for your play.
Simply put, if you let the clock work against you, you will lose each and every time. You just have to decide whether you want to negotiate or gamble!
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The fourth “Don’t” or the second “F” in GAFFS is Don’t: Focus on the person; focus on the “deal.”
Oftentimes, due to the stress of negotiating, emotions can run high. Without realizing it, personalities enter the equation and can slowly creep into the bargaining equation. I honestly cannot say that everyone I ever had the opportunity to negotiate with has been my “new best friend.” I will say, however, that each time I let personal feelings enter the equation, I ended up with less than an I otherwise could have by focusing on the business rather than the person.
Let’s be realistic. You will not necessarily enjoy the company of everyone with whom you negotiate. And, you need to recognize that in the eyes of every other person you encounter during negotiations, you will not be the person that makes them happy.
The key is to recognize when the other party is getting to your emotions and take a break. I found that if I could caucus with my team and tell them what was bothering me about the other party, we often ended up laughing about it before returning to the negotiating table. In many case, it was a function of stress and diminished energy that was interfering with my thought processes.
The key here is to defuse the situation before continuing with the negotiations. The worst thing you can do is display your emotions with an outburst of words that can never be retracted. In some cultures it could be such an embarrassment that the other party might reconsider whether they want to continue to negotiate with you personally. They even may go so far as to question whether they want to do business with your company.
In summary, focusing on the person instead of the “deal” only serves to weaken your position. The problem is you’ll never know by how much!
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Here is the third “Don’t” or the first “F” in GAFFS. Don’t: Fill every void in the conversation.
There are two very key points to remember when you think about this tip.
First, when you are talking, it is pretty obvious that the other party will be listening and gathering more information. In other words, the more you talk, the more information you provide. Remember the third of the 5 R’s to “request information.” The more you have, the stronger your negotiating position and the better the final outcome.
Second, if you remain silent and refrain from filling every void in the conversation, eventually the other party more than likely will offer additional information to clarify their position.
I am by no means suggesting that you turn your negotiating session into a contest to see “who blinks first,” but the old adage that “silence is golden” has a lot of value at the negotiating table when utilized properly.
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Recently, I accompanied my wife on a shopping excursion to acquire some “post Xmas super savings”. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do that day, but figured it might provide an opportunity for some creative negotiation somewhere along the way.
In one store, we went up to a table with a large sign announcing “Selected Items 60% Off”. As the table contained some candles that my wife was specifically looking for, she thought that she would be saving a significant amount of money by buying ahead for next year. My spin was, “this is how you go broke saving money”, but just to keep the peace, I kept that thought to myself.
When the clerk began to ring up the candles, the discount was only 25%. With a smile on my face, I asked the clerk to accompany me back to the table. I then asked that she read me the sign as I must have misread it or had a “senior moment” as I thought the items on the table were “60% off”. She pointed out that only “Selected Items” were 60% off.
Again, with a smile, I said, “That’s what I read too”, and I “selected” these items, so don’t you think I should get 60% off? Actually, I was joust having some fun, as I was getting bored. When she stopped laughing, we returned to the register at which point she took another 25% off the candles.
Not a bad return for a bit of humor. More importantly, however,once again it supports my negotiating tip, “You only get what you ask for or If you don’t ask, you don’t get”.
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Following on with the 5 Don’ts we come to the second of the “GAFFS” or the letter “A” which is Don’t: Accept the first offer.
Let’s face it, if you were to accept the first offer, or if the other party accepted your first offer, how do you think it would make you feel? I’ll bet that shortly after walking away with the good feeling you had a few moments earlier, you soon would have a big question in your mind.
The feeling that would soon overtake you could be classified as buyer’s or seller’s remorse. The obvious question that would arise in your mind would be “I wonder how much better I could have done if I only had taken time to ask questions, or in effect, initiate a negotiation?”
Remember what we learned in the 5 R’s “If you don’t ask; you don’t get!” Well if you accept the first offer, obviously you didn’t ask, and guess what — you didn’t get! So, next time you have the opportunity, and the opportunities are all around you, ask for something before you commit. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain! The worst case scenario is that the other party may say “No” in which case you have lost nothing except perhaps a moment of your time. On the other hand, you may just end up with a better deal having taken a minute to probe beyond the first offer.
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In the last article, I outlined the five Don’ts or the “GAFFS” to help you improve your negotiating skills and outcomes. Today we’ll take a look at the first of these five Don’ts or the “G”. The rest of the Don’ts will be covered in the next series of articles.
The first of these is Don’t: Give anything away without getting something in return. When you indicate that you are willing to give something to the other party, make it very clear that you are making a concession and that you expect something in return. The thing to remember is that negotiating is like trading; it is not a one way street where all concessions favor one party.
The key is that to achieve a satisfactory outcome, both parties must be satisfied with the final agreement. To make that happen will require both parties making concessions along the way. Just make sure the other party understands they are gaining something each time you concede a point and also make sure that you get something in return before the negotiations have concluded.
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We now have covered five key things you must do if you are going to achieve a successful outcome in your negotiations. Equally as important are the things you should not do if you are going to be satisfied with your negotiated outcome.
Today’s article will begin to focus on the “Don’ts” or the “GAFFS”.
When you look these over you’ll soon realize that they are fundamental to success in every negotiation. Every experienced negotiator already has these tips ingrained. This is not to say that they are the only tips you need to remember, but once you have included them in your negotiating arsenal, they certainly will go a long way to helping you achieve more successful and satisfactory agreements.
Similar to what we did when reviewing the “5 R’s”, I have left the list of “GAFFS” only partially complete so you can think about filling in the blanks.
Here are the tips that have worked for me:
DON’T (The GAFFS)
1. Give something away without ____________________
2. Accept the _____________________________________
3. Fill every void in the _________________________
4. Focus on the_________; instead focus on the ____
5. Set arbitrary __________________________________
The next few articles will fill in the blanks and provide more information about each of these power negotiating tips. In the meantime, have fun filling in the blanks.
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Well here we are at power negotiating tip number five of the “5 R’s” which simply put is: Read the body language of others.
Learning to read the body language of other people at the negotiating table as well as the other people in the room will provide you with a wealth of information. Body language or body signals are like “tells” at the card table. You need to focus on what other people are telling you through their body language.
There are volumes written about this subject, but I would like to point out a couple of signals I have encountered often. First: Someone leaning back away from the table probably is telling you that they are not buying into what you are proposing. Second: Nervousness is often shown by constant swinging of the leg. Third: Pay particular attention to the other person’s eyes. We can pretty much control the muscles in our lower face, but not the upper portion. Professional poker players understand this and have take to wearing sunglasses to avoid one set of “tells” from their game.
Periodically, you also need to remind yourself to pay attention to what kind of messages you, and the other members of your team, may be sending through your body language. There is nothing worse than putting something out on the table and having one of your team members sit there and shake his head “no” while you are explaining your position. Something like this could not only cause the other party to flatly reject your position, but also could cause them to question your integrity.
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Continuing down the list of power negotiating tips brings us to number four of the “5 R’s” which is: Refrain from “splitting the difference”.
Avoid falling into the perception that is widely attributed to most North American negotiators — an eagerness to get to the bottom line quickly to make the issue go away by “splitting the difference.” Outside the United States many cultures picture us as John Wayne riding in on a white horse with guns blazing saying something like “Here’s what we’re going to do now, so we can move on”.
If you are recognized as someone who is uncomfortable with negotiating so that you often split the difference, the other party will soon learn to adjust their sights and ratchet up the stakes in their favor. If you are completely honest with yourself, when you negotiated your last major purchase like a car or a house, at some point you either got tired of negotiating, or you got frustrated with the process, and you ended up by “splitting the difference”.
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