Whether it’s your professional or personal life, negotiations are omnipresent in all life’s situations. Having good negotiation skills will not only advance your career but also make your personal life healthy, balanced, and happy.
A great way of imparting negotiation skills is to attend negotiation seminars conducted by experts. They are skilled, experienced, and have years of expertise in teaching you the fundamentals of negotiation. Today we will explore a few negotiation strategies that are taught in seminars that will help you close deals that ensure both parties walk away from the negotiation, content and happy!
Table of Contents
Negotiations with a collaborative mindset:
When both negotiators are dedicated to finding a mutually beneficial solution, then the negotiation process goes smoothly. Both of you are trying to find common ground, and it is in your best interests that the other party does not suffer any loss through the deal. If you differ with your negotiating partner in minor specifics, try and sort that through trade-offs.
Handing roadblocks in negotiations:
You can ask open-ended questions and offer polite suggestions that give you an idea about the concessions the other party is willing to make. If you can’t get your preferred deal in one parameter, try and change other parameters to your advantage. For example, if you cannot obtain a higher price, try changing the scope of work, cost of services, value-added services, or any such variable.
Finding Pressure-points:
To be a successful negotiator, you must find the pressure points of your opponents that you can leverage for a better outcome. For example, if you know they previously had a bad experience with a service provider, you can highlight the consequences of compromising quality by bargaining too much on service price.
Breaking an impasse in negotiations:
An impasse is a pretty common situation in high-pressure negotiations. It usually happens when the parties involved are unable to find a mutually beneficial solution. There are various ways to solve an impasse, switching the people who are taking the lead in the negotiations, introducing a mediator, modifying the work scope, changing the budget, etc.,
Dealing with the ‘last and final offer’:
If you are in a ‘take it or leave it’ scenario, you can never be sure if it’s an actual ultimatum or just a bluff. If you show that you are prepared to bow before the threat, then your leverage will be gone. So no matter what, always maintain composure and do not show desperation.
A Few Time-tested Negotiation Strategies Experts Swear By:
- The Multiple-offers Strategy: If you table multiple offers, you might learn a lot from how your negotiating partner responds to each of them. If they reject all of those offers, ask which one they find most profitable. That will give you an idea about the other party’s preferences and needs and show you the way to follow for finding win-win solutions.
- The Time Pressure strategy: The threat of a deadline has unpredictable effects on people. It might lead them to make rash decisions resulting in better terms for their opponent, or they might make them abort from the negotiation process altogether. Either way, deadlines force people to make decisions quickly. If you feel that a negotiation has been dragging on endlessly without any optimum outcome, use the threat of time pressure to force the other party into making a move.
- The ‘Bogey’ Strategy: This essentially means that you are offering your counterpart only one deal, and you are unwilling to budge an inch from it. This kind of obstinate resilience might work in some specific scenarios, but it might also destabilize the negotiation, so use it wisely in relevant situations.
Closing Thoughts
A well-conducted negotiation seminar can cut your learning curve considerably. If you keep in mind some of the teachings mentioned above from some of the best negotiation seminars, you’ll already be able to see a difference.
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