business negotiation tips

Advice to help you in your next business negotiation. Learn how to create value, manage your negotiating team, and how to develop a long-term relationship with your counterpart.

The following items are tagged business negotiation tips.

Negotiation Skills Tips: Be a Relationship Negotiator

Posted by & filed under Negotiation Skills.

During talks, effective relationship negotiators focus on a variety of noncontractual issues, including:

Getting to know the other side well
Establishing a positive personal chemistry between the leadership of the companies involved
Understanding and respecting each other’s cultures, expectations, and goals
Putting mechanisms in place to foster communication after the contract is signed
Ensuring that the proposed deal is balanced and advantageous for both sides
Identifying and planning for potential obstacles to implementation

When Time Isn’t Money

Posted by & filed under Conflict Resolution.

Due to deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, women may find it easier to negotiate their time instead of their financial compensation.

Consider that men and women are likely to rely on gender-stereotypic arguments to support their demands in negotiation. For women, the gender-stereotypic notion of being caregivers is readily available and likely to be well received. By contrast, men, who generally are expected to be the primary family breadwinner, have less difficulty negotiating financial issues than women do.

Why Busy People Like Drafts

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How can you gain an edge when you’re in the seemingly weak position of negotiating a favor from a government or powerful bureaucracy? Present the other side with a draft agreement that authorizes or approves your request. Busy bureaucrats who lack a strong grasp of the details at hand are likely to seize on your text as a time-saver. That’s precisely why Washington lobbyists put drafts of the laws they desire, usually written by high-priced attorneys, in the hands of congressional staff.

Business Negotiations: Cooperate to Claim Value

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What happens in negotiations between two individuals who care little about each other’s outcomes? Suppose an engineer and an industrial designer are arguing over the design of a car bumper. The designer only cares about whether the bumper matches the style of the vehicle; the engineer is concerned only about how the bumper connects to the front. After describing the trouble he’s having with the existing design, the engineer presents a solution that the designer deems “ugly.” The designer threatens to involve her boss if the engineer doesn’t revert back to the prior design.

Try Skills-Based Strategies First

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Before launching a workaround, run through this list of skills-based strategies adopted from Getting Past No: Negotiating Your Way from Confrontation to Cooperation by William Ury (Bantam, 1993). Only attempt a workaround if you’ve tried them all without success:

In Deal Making, Broaden Your Focus

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Imagine that you are in charge of renting a new location for a branch of your company in a nearby city. After researching the reputations of a number of local real estate agents, you meet with several and choose the one who seems most knowledgable and responsive.