Category Archives: Negotiation

When You Negotiate Are You A Zombie

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Have you ever been involved in a negotiation and felt like you were just going through the motion? When doing so, did you feel like a zombie, someone that was not following his or her own will? Have you ever thought about why and how that occurred?

Zombie like states can be induced during a negotiation, and if you’re not careful, they can be very devastating on your negotiation efforts.

The following are factors that contribute to a zombie like state during a negotiation.

1. Voice tonality and pace, yours and that of the other negotiator, can put you into a trance-like state. Hypnosis is based on the premise of using certain suggestive phrases in a repetitive manner, based on the outcome being sought. During a negotiation, practitioners of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) can make suggestions to your subconscious mind and alter your will. Stay alert to such tactics.

2. Time pressure can leave any negotiator in a zombie like state of mind. The pressures of time in a negotiation can create a level of tension that could cause you to vary your normal thought processing. Be aware of where you are in a negotiation, as it relates to time, and guard against the negativity that time pressure can inflict upon you.

3. Being forced to address details when you’re not mentally prepared to do so can wear you down and contribute to you becoming zombie like when you negotiate. Observe your mental level of energy during a negotiation to combat fatigue. Be aware that you’ll become more susceptible to making mental errors of judgment when you’re not as alert as would otherwise be the case.

4. Be aware of false compliments. False compliments bestowed upon you during a negotiation can be a red herring (e.g. something that attracts attention from the real issue). In essence, the false compliments can be made to get you to continue down a path that is more advantageous to the other negotiator. By following that path, you can become robotic and like a zombie (e.g. following the other negotiator’s lead to receive more compliments).

5. Triggers (i.e. suggested phrases, scents, music, etc.) can be used to create a hypnotic state when negotiating. If you’ve ever experienced a mood shift as the result of hearing a certain song, or listening to a particular phrase, you responded to a trigger. During negotiations, be mentally attuned to the triggers that might stimulate you to shift your mindset and cause your mental center of gravity (emotional state of mind) to be altered.

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Negotiate Successfully By Stopping Your Negotiation Secrets From Being Leaked

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With Wikileaks leaking U.S. government secret and sensitive communications, the question becomes, how susceptible to leaks are your negotiation plans, strategies, and secrets?

Governments and corporations around the world guard their secrets before a negotiation. The reason being, the more adept they are at creating a negotiation plan that’s not encumbered by outsiders knowing their strategy, the higher the probability that they’ll achieve a successful negotiation outcome.

Like governments and corporations, when you negotiate, the plans and strategies you create determine how successful your outcome might be, too. Thus, if the other negotiator is aware of your strategy, he can thwart your efforts, while enhancing his own.

How can you protect yourself, your business and/or corporation before and during a negotiation, to keep your negotiation plans a secret? Consider the following:

1. You can prevent your negotiation secrets from being leaked by restricting those that have access to the information and the flow of information that stems from the negotiation, once it begins.

2. When contemplating how you might protect your negotiation secrets, consider all of the environments in which such information might be compromised and put safe guards in place to prevent it.

3. You can also prevent leaks of your real plans by creating misdirection. This entails creating a false negotiation plan that’s strategically placed in areas that the opposing negotiator might frequent. In essence, allow your negotiation plans to be left in places where the other negotiator can be find them. Having thought they’ve uncovered your negotiation strategy and plans, the other negotiator will more than likely create a strategy to combat yours. Such an act will put them at a disadvantage, due to the misguided input upon which they’ll base their strategies.

4. Prior to the official negotiation, dependent upon how sensitive the information that you do not wish to have disclosed, you can negotiate with the other negotiator for what can and can’t be used during the negotiation. Be aware that you may have to pay a high price for such consideration, but if you’re in damage control mode, the price you pay may be worth the outcome. As an example, with the U.S. government and Wikileaks, the U.S. government could have requested that Wikileaks not leak sensitive information, had that been an option prior to information being leaked.

Suffice it to say, if you’re astute at creating your negotiation plans and protecting its content from peeking eyes, you’ll be much further along the path of a successful negotiation outcome… and everything will be right with the world. Remember, you’re always negotiating.

Negotiation Quote:

“Only an unwise man allows others to see what is of true value to him, when he knows that true value should be hidden.”

The Negotiation Tips Are…

· You can never be too cautious with your negotiation plans. The better you conceal your real negotiation efforts, until the proper time to disclose them, the better positioned you’ll be throughout the negotiation.

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Why The Planning Purpose Trap Will Get A Sales Negotiator Every Time

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A sales negotiation can sometimes sneak up on you, and if you aren’t careful it can bite you in the rear. One such case is what’s called the “planning purpose trap” and it has bitten more than one sales negotiator. It turns out that there’s really no reason to fall into this trap and so I’m going to tell you what you need to be watching out for…

The Set Up

The planning purpose trap starts out innocently enough. The other side comes to you prior to any negotiations starting and makes what appears to be a simple request: could you provide them with a planning price?

They’ll give a number of different reasons for asking for this price. Perhaps they need to get budget approval. Or perhaps they need to advise their management of the rough size of the deal that you’ll be talking about. No matter – they’ll tell you that the number doesn’t need to be exact and that you won’t be held to it.

What will you do when you get a request like this? If you are like most of us, you’ll sit down and come up with a rough estimate of what the final deal will look like. You’ll probably take into account what you think the other side will be able to pay and you’ll make sure that your estimate is on the low side because you don’t want to scare them away from the deal with a high price.

Ah, now you are trapped.

How Things Go Bad – For You

After we provide this type of “planning price” we often forget that we’ve done it. Instead we focus on the negotiations that are coming up. We figure that we’ve “primed the pump” and they know the ballpark that we’ll be playing in when it comes to talking about prices.

That’s where we’re wrong. More often than not, what will happen is that when the real negotiations start, the other side is going to object to any price that we put on the table that is higher than the “planning” price that we’ve already provided them with.

Their reasons for objecting may vary, but they will all have a common theme. They’ll say something along the lines of “…but that’s not what you told me”. They may say that they’ve only got budget / authorization for the amount that you already told them about. No matter how they put it, they are effectively putting pressure on you to provide them with a price that is close to the low planning estimate that you’ve already provided to them.

How To Avoid Getting Trapped

In order to avoid falling into the planning purpose trap, you need to take some very specific steps. The first of these is to realize from the outset that ANY price that you provide to the other side is more than likely to come back to haunt you.

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How To Manage A Negotiation

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Do you enjoy mystifying your equivalent with specifics, statistics and “uncontrolled” emotional outbursts? If you intend on building up a long-term association with your business partner you should avoid strategies like these. There are four ways of introducing a more supportive negotiating technique as taught on a good management course as follows:

Separate person from situation

Negotiations can quickly change from discussions about technical points to conflicts between personalities. If the person responsible is annoyed by the question during negotiation then none of the logical arguments in the world will progress the situation. If you offend someone’s ego, their sense of being right or their values then their negotiating position is more likely to harden.

If you blame someone, criticise them or reject their ideas and suggestions, they will feel attacked and hit back at the same level. During the whole negotiation, try to discuss questions in a productive way and maintain a positive relationship with the other person. Human emotions and fears may hinder the progress, if you are unable to make questions mutual or do not keep the discussions on a technical basis. Therefore you would need to change the way in which you negotiate. Here are some examples taken from a management course:

From formulations like – To a problem solving oriented approach?
You are 5 weeks behind schedule – How can we make up the timing of the project?
You have exceeded your budget – Do you think we have made a mistake with the budget planning?
Your prices are too high – At this price we can no longer compete
Your results are not within the plan – How can we keep to this year’s plan?

Negotiate about interests rather than positions

When negotiating, your partner states their position in order to satisfy their particular basic requirements. A purchaser demands a particular price because they want to maintain a profitability standard. An employee demands a particular wage because they consider it to be the appropriate value in return for their performance. As soon a you know the interests which lie behind the concrete demands, you can often find other ways of solving problems without necessarily having to give in.

The supplier could react to the request for lower prices with the suggestion of building a team jointly with the purchaser in order to improve the production of components and thereby reduce the costs. In order to increase turnover for both sides the supplier could alternatively, offer a series of joint promotions to encourage sales.

The manager may not be in a position to offer more money to an employee due to budget limitations or company policy. Alternatively they could offer more responsibility, more recognition or other benefits. These alternatives satisfy the employee’s need to feel valued.

Put together a choice of options

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