The Hindu Business Line : How to win at negotiations?

IF there is one thing common between a hostage drama and a purchase decision, between asking for a pay-hike and getting your child to study, it is negotiating. When you win at negotiations, you leave the other person feeling he or she also won. Secrets of Power Negotiating has the `inside secrets from a master negotiator', Roger Dawson. A sampler:

Consultants know that you should always negotiate your fee up front, not afterward. Plumbers know this, don't they? This is because the value of services always appears to decline rapidly after you have performed those services.

A person's mind always works to reinforce decisions that it has just made. So, power negotiators use the `nibbling' gambit to get a little bit more even after you have agreed on everything. Children are brilliant nibblers.

With a few rare exceptions, human beings tend to help people that they see as less intelligent or informed. Most people want to compete with people they see as brighter and help people they see as less bright. So, power negotiators may act dumb. When you are negotiating, you're better off acting as if you know less than everybody else does, not more. That diffuses the competitive spirit of the other side.

When you're negotiating, never reveal that you have a deadline, such as a flight to catch and so on. If they know you're under time pressure, they could delay the bulk of the negotiations until the last possible minute. Then there's a real danger that you'll give things away under that kind of time pressure.

Suppose you tell a supplier that unless he can deliver by noon tomorrow you will go with his competitor. If the deadline passes and you haven't done that, you have just lost all of your power in the negotiation. You should only use ultimatum as a pressure point if you are willing to follow through. Don't bluff, because all the other side has to do is wait through your deadline to find out that you were only bluffing and your threat had no teeth in it.

Now, what would happen if both the sides in a negotiation read the book?

Squeeze more from a day

It is the same 24 hours for the CEO to chaprasi, housewife to salesmen. You need to manage time properly, advise time management experts. And when salespeople have to manage time, they can't apply the usual techniques, says Dave Kahle in 10 secrets of Time Management for Salespeople. And what are they?

All great time managers have one thing in common. They have the `more' mindset. They believe that there is more to life than just this. There is more that you can do, more that you can become. There is more to your job than where you are at today. There is more challenge, more to achieve. They strive to do more, be more and have more because they believe that they can and they should.

There is probably no one area of your business that is more important for you to prioritise than your customers and prospects. Fortunately, it's also the area of your job that will make the biggest impact on your performance. Too often, salespeople spend time with customers who like them, or who are easy to see, or who have become friends. But if those customers aren't high potential, then investing time in them isn't smart.

Sometimes our problems with using time effectively are internal, silently lurking in the confines of subconscious routines. You can create the greatest plans in the world, have the best intentions, be full of energy and thoroughly prepared; but be rendered ineffective by mindless time-wasting habits, many of which you are probably not even aware.

It's not enough to protect yourself from the onslaught of useless information. You must also be sure that you are acquiring the appropriate amount of useful information. `Sales' is a thinking person's game. You can't think well if you don't have the raw material. And raw material is information.

If you have integrity, you save your customer time. In today's frenzied world, time is more precious than money for a lot of people. If your customers cannot believe you, then they must spend hours, days, or weeks of precious time confirming the representations you have made.

You can make `every second count'.

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Courtesy: Landmark