First Step Marketing

When you hear about negotiations in the newspapers or hear about them on TV or radio programmes, they are often described as having ‘winners’ or ‘losers’. In high profile industrial disputes or in compensation cases, it is a victory for one side and a defeat for the other. But negotiating is something that you do with someone — not to them. This means that, in reality, these sorts of negotiation generally consist of discussions between professional negotiators — discussions that are aimed at reaching agreements, agreements to which everybody involved is a party, agreements that contain benefits to both sides.

Taking this step — turning away from the adversarial combat of the win—lose approach and stepping towards the creation of jointly agreed deals and trade-offs — is the first of your strategic decisions. It is not an optional one. For if you’re going to be an effective negotiator, the acts of generating jointly agreed outcomes and working together for the long run are musts rather than options. But, having said that, you do stand a good chance of meeting others who don’t see things that way, who aren’t effective negotiators. Their interests will be in the short term; they will be after the ‘quick buck’. Negotiators like this can take advantage of the ill prepared or unwary. As an effective negotiator you must be able to cope with this aggressive ‘win—lose’ style. In the meantime, let’s look at the options that you face when choosing the strategy you’ll follow in your negotiation — a negotiation that you’ll do with rather than to the people on the other side of the negotiating table.

Strategic Options

When you look back at what you’ve already decided you might think that you’ve already chosen your negotiating strategy. You’ve decided what you need, identified its most important features and researched all that you can about it. You’ve even decided what, for you, are its ideal, minimum and realistic values. So what’s left to do?

Let’s try and answer that question by being particular. Let’s assume, for example, that you (and your partner) have decided that you need a new freezer or cold box. After some discussion you decide that, for you, the most important features of the freezer are:

These priorities lead you to conclude that you need an upright freezer with pull-out drawers. You read the consumer reports and tests and go out into the stores to look at them, you open the doors, remove the trays and look at the instruction. You talk to the salespeople in the stores, find out whether they know what they’re talking about, test whether a deal is possible. Finally, after balancing your budget and talking to the loan manager at the bank, you arrive at the point where you can define the desired outcome of your negotiation. That is that you know the make, model and price of the freezer that you want. So what’s next?

What’s next is that you need to decide how you’re going to get that freezer into your kitchen or garage at a price you can live with. Your route to this lies through the store and, more specifically, through a salesperson. You’ll have a name — you noted it down when you did your research visit — and you’ve timed your negotiating visit for when the store isn’t busy. You’ve also found out as much as you can about their sales incentive plan from the recruitment section of the store’s Internet site and a neighbour who used to work there. You may even have been able to find out something about the salesperson’s interests and background. If all this seems a lot of work just to buy a freezer, remember that the same needs and principles will apply when the stakes are much higher — when you buy your next house, for example, or when you’re negotiating at work over that new mainframe computer. If you get it right with the small buys — when the risk is lower and you can more easily afford to make mistakes — then you’ll get it right on the big ones. So are you ready now — can you begin?

Not yet — because before you get into the fine grain, the nitty- gritty of your negotiation, you still have at least three decisions to make. These are about:

• Whether you go it alone or as part of a team of negotiators
• the order and content of your ‘things to do’ list for your negotiations, and, finally what tactics you’ll use.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Winning or Losing, Negotiating ‘winners’ or ‘losers’

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 3:23 am and is filed under Business Management, Career Management, Marketing, Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.