As the following points will demonstrate, ensuring that your counterpart is satisfied with a particular deal requires you to manage several aspects of the negotiation process, including his outcome expectations, his perceptions of your outcome, the comparisons he makes with others, and his overall negotiation experience itself.
salespeople
The following items are tagged salespeople.
5 Tips for Closing the Deal
What to do when you’ve done everything right, but you still don’t have an agreement.
Wheelers and Dealers?
Car salespeople truly understand how to use modest concessions to extract much larger ones.
First, they spend a long time legitimating the sticker price and suggesting that it’s not only fair, but nonnegotiable.
Laughing Matters
You don’t have to be serious to be a serious negotiator. Humor, deftly used, can be a positive factor in promoting agreement.
That’s what Finnish researcher Taina Vuorela confirmed in a comparative study of two real-world transactions. One was an internal meeting of a sales team trying to hammer out a strategy to land a potential customer. The other was the subsequent negotiation between that same team and its outside client.
Are You Listening to Me?
For your next negotiation, what would you pay for a gadget that shows you how well you’re engaging the other side?
It would tell you when you’ve been persuasive enough to close a deal.
It would also alert you when the other side has tuned you out, so you’d know how to take a different tack.
A team of researchers at MIT’s Media Laboratory are developing just such a device: specifically, software for cell phones and PDAs that analyzes speech patterns and tone of voice to determine how people are relating in conversation.
When negotiation goals backfire
Adapted from “Managers: Think Twice Before Setting Negotiation Goals,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, May 2009.
In the years leading up to its collapse, energy-trading company Enron promised its salespeople large bonuses for meeting challenging revenue goals. This focus on revenue rather than profit contributed to widespread fraud and, ultimately, to the firm’s downfall.
To encourage
Set your sales force up for success
Adapted from “Managing for Better Results,” by Max H. Bazerman, first published in the Negotiation newsletter, October 2008.
If you’ve ever been disappointed by the negotiation results of your sales force, you’re not alone. There could be many reasons for your employees’ unimpressive results, but there are two most likely culprits: a failure to understand what
Avoid the Green-eyed Monster
Adapted from “Negotiating with the Green-eyed Monster,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
Envy can cause us to engage in deception at the bargaining table. That’s the cautionary finding of research by Simone Moran of Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Maurice E. Schweitzer of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Why might negotiators be more
Bridging the Gap Between Groups
Adapted from “What Divides You Can Unite You,” by Susan Hackley (managing director, Program on Negotiation), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
When we think about negotiating with people from other cultures, we tend to think globally: how might differences in nationality or race affect our bargaining outcomes? But cultural differences can also be local, existing
The Power of Schadenfreude
Adapted from “Negotiating with the Green-eyed Monster,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
Envy can cause us to engage in deception at the bargaining table. That’s the cautionary finding of recent research by Simone Moran of Ben-Gurion University in Israel and Maurice E. Schweitzer of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
In one experiment, Israeli
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