Negotiation Skills in 7 simple steps. Clare Dignall
to fail
Allow your walk-away points to change during a negotiation.
Always assume you have the least leverage.
Don’t rehearse your strategy – be spontaneous.
Insist on negotiating at your chosen venue.
Speak very loudly to appear more confident.
Create your negotiation strategy
You’ve spent valuable time preparing for negotiations: gathering information and identifying what you want and what you can concede to reach a satisfactory agreement. Now it’s time to distil your efforts into a negotiation strategy: not a fixed plan, but a flexible guideline of what you hope to achieve and how you aim to act along the way.
Your strategy should consider the following, many of which you’ll have identified already from your preparation in Step 1:
What you want to have: These should include your ‘must-haves’ and a few ‘give-aways’ that you can offer if necessary.
What you must have: These are your minimum requirements. You need these for the negotiation to be successful.
Your BATNA: This is your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. If you simply can’t get what you want, your BATNA is your second-best option.
Your ‘walk-away’ point: This is the point where you have to stop negotiating, before you come away with less than your minimum requirements.
Your proposed approach: This is the manner in which you aim to reach a deal. In most cases, bargaining will be the mainstay of your negotiations, but you may find that haggling gets results for specific elements.
Make your strategy watertight
For your strategy to be in with a fighting chance it must be both realistic and informed. To knock it into shape, you can’t think about your negotiation strategy in isolation, but must understand the context in which you’ll use it.
Am I in the right ballpark?
To create a realistic negotiation proposal, find out as much as you can about the goal that you seek. Say, for example, you’re applying for a new job with prospects, but whose salary is just too low for you to start on, and you plan to negotiate it up if you get it. To create a workable strategy, first find out what your own ‘market value’ is, to avoid setting your sights too low or too high. You might check comparable positions on recruitment websites or in newspaper jobs pages, or speak to an adviser (at a job centre or a recruitment agency) for indicative salaries. Talk to (trusted) contacts who’ve negotiated pay to understand how their negotiated rise compared against what they’d hoped. If you’re representing a supplier company, the same applies; you must find out about your competitors’ prices before you set down your own in a negotiation strategy.
Who has the most leverage?
In negotiations ‘leverage’ is the term used to describe how much weight one party has in influencing how negotiations will turn out. Identifying how much leverage each party has will help you use your negotiation strategy effectively, and this discovery can be surprising. If you’re negotiating with a superior e.g. your boss, or a big corporate like your broadband provider, it’s easy to assume that they’ll have the most leverage, because they’re ‘higher up’ or ‘bigger’ than you, but this isn’t always the case.
Say you’ve interviewed for a new job and been offered it, though you still enjoy your present job. You could, at this point, meet with your current boss to negotiate better pay, and be the party with the most leverage. Why? You can go into negotiations knowing that you’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain. If your boss cannot meet your ‘must-have’ requirements, then you’re in the lucky position of your ‘walk-away’ scenario being exactly that – you can walk into another job. Pulling this information out of the bag when negotiations reach an impasse wields great leverage. Your boss knows that if he/she cannot meet at least your ‘must-have’ requirements he/she’s likely to lose you, and recruitment costs both time and money. Negotiate costs with a big broadband provider that loudly advertises affordability and you, as a paying customer, have some leverage because you’ve identified better deals, are willing to move elsewhere to get them, and are happy to tell your friends to do so too.
How do I stick to my walk-away points?
The safety-net that lies under your entire strategy is your ability to walk away at any point, before you’re drawn by momentum into agreeing on less than your ‘must-haves’. Your walk-away points needn’t be financially-driven. They can include anything that is unacceptable to you: signing a long contract when you need a shorter one; negotiations that last longer than a specified period; or having to move house if offered a promotion. Be careful to note all your walk-away points. There may be several, and they may be unrelated. They mustn’t be decided whilst you’re negotiating, but identified in advance, written down in a calm moment, and fixed in stone. They are non-negotiable. Give in on these and you risk everything, including your credibility: in plain terms, you’ve been walked over – publicly.
How does a BATNA work?
Not every negotiation can arrive at an agreement. Your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) can provide an alternative to walking away and damaging relationships with those you have to work with afterwards. Say you’re negotiating with your manager for extra training, but she says ‘I simply have no budget for training’. Rather than walk away from the prospect of career progression, your BATNA may provide alternatives to satisfy some of your interests. Extra holiday entitlement, or half-day Fridays, would give you some capacity to pursue training under your own steam. The BATNA creatively acknowledges the fact that negotiations have failed to provide agreement now, but that you value the ongoing relationship.
Offer to draw up an agenda
Contact your opposite number, and ask what they’d like on the agenda for discussion. This will reveal the issues that are important to them, possible areas for mutual agreement, and will also highlight those questions that you’ve not yet considered in your research. Distributing this agenda will tell the opposite party what’s important to you, and oblige them to talk about it; they can’t wriggle out of an agenda point if they’ve agreed the document. An agenda saves time and minimizes surprises: no properly structured meeting should wander much from its original format. An advance agenda also removes the fear of the unknown, and gives you a chance to rehearse what you want to say.
Business writing: agendas
This simple but invaluable written document should include the date, time and venue, followed by a list of the people attending. Items for discussion are listed in the order you propose they be discussed, numbered accordingly. If anyone has a specific role, that’s worthwhile recording.
Date/Time: 01 February 2014 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.
Venue: Meeting Room C, Taylor Building
Attendees: Marc Fisher, Sarah Tait, Jim Morton
Items for discussion
1 Marc Fisher’s current roles and responsibilities
2 Office changes: next 12 months
3 Changes to office administration roles