Having effective negotiation strategies will help your business grow. Negotiation is not just about your own needs, but also your counterpart’s in the negotiation as well. To negotiate well, you must have answers for these questions:
- What would be the best and worst deals for my business?
- What does my counterpart want from the negotiation?
- What can I expect from this negotiation for my business?
- What are the consensus points on which we can both agree?
Finding answers to these questions will allow you to be clear and levelheaded on the negotiation table. So, what strategies can you use to fetch the desired results for your business?
1. Consider Everything
How well you negotiate on the table significantly depends upon your research. Before anything else, you must understand your own business extremely well.
Know what your customers want, and see what your competitors expect them to do.
Figure out how your business, employees, and customers can benefit from the deal. Ensure that the proposal will not negatively impact critical factors for your business, like customer trust, employee workload, and your main business functions.
At the end of the negotiation, you must predict the deal’s impact for your business, both in the short and long term.
2. Know What Your Counterpart Wants
Most of the time, your counterparts are talking about how your business benefits from the deal or how both of you are benefiting from it. However, it’s a fact there is always a hidden agenda. You must be intuitive enough to foresee how your counterpart in the negotiation is benefiting from the deal.
To know what they want, you first need to study your counterpart. Look at their public records, actions, and policies. See how this deal helps them take their business needs to a different level.
3. Closely Examine Any Win-Win Situation
Don’t consider a win-win situation to be a loss for yourself. At times, counterparts are equally well-prepared and up to the task to getting what they want out of a negotiation.
However, you must assess your business requirements before agreeing to a win-win deal. See if coming to a mutual consensus can be beneficial for your business in the long run.
Determine if all those targets that you had in mind with the deal are met. You would never want to play right into your counterpart’s hands in any negotiation, so be mindful of what your goals were going into the negotiation.
4. Always Provide An Extra “No”
On the negotiation table, both parties can be tested to their respective limits, but you should always be willing to go a bit further for the deal that you really want.
Suppose you are sitting at the table for a luxury yacht’s price. You want to sell it for $1 million with a threshold price limit of $900,000, but your counterpart agrees to buy it for $800,000. After various negotiations, your counterpart might stretch themselves and want to lock in a price of $900,000.
This is when your counterpart is testing you. Another “No” from you right then and there might get them to go up to $950,000. However, if you settled for $900,000 because it was not bringing you any losses, you would have missed out on a margin of $50,000 — because you didn’t say “No” one more time at the negotiation table.
Becoming A Great Negotiator
Healthy negotiators are invaluable assets for businesses: they help elevate business operations by closing better deals.
The really good negotiators indulge in extensive business, customer, counterpart, and competitor research to figure out the best strategies for their businesses.
The art of saying an extra “No” and foreseeing your counterpart’s intentions is what separates great negotiators from the rest.
