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Would you like to be a better negotiator? Sure, we all would. The trick is finding out just exactly how to move from where our negotiating skills currently are to where we’d like them to be. It turns out that it’s not all about who has the best negotiation styles and negotiating techniques. There’s got to be a way to do this…
In The End, It’s All About Finding The Right Deal
If you want to become a better negotiator, then you need to make sure that you understand why you are negotiating in the first place. It can be all too easy to think that a negotiation is a type of competition or a contest.
Nothing could be further from the truth. What you need to be spending your time doing is searching for how you can find the best deal for both sides of the table. The good news is that such a deal always exists. The bad news is that it may be tricky to find.
In order to find a deal that will produce a “win-win” result for everyone, both sides of the table have to work together. You both need to join forces in order to find the best deal for both of you. Do this right, and everyone will walk away from the negotiations a winner.
Good News – You Have A Lot Of Power
The next time that you sit down at a negotiation, you may be thinking that you are operating at a disadvantage. For one reason or another, you may believe that the other side of the table has all of the power and you have very little.
The good news is that this is not the case. The other side has to operate under a set of needs and constraints that their organization has saddled them with. You may not know what these are, but they are there. Even though you can’t see it, this burden is placing pressure on their position even before the negotiations start.
What this means for you is that you need to find ways to ignore the pressures that have been placed on you. Instead, you need to spend your time working to discover what pressures the other side of the table is operating under. Find out what limits them and you’ll be the one at the table with all of the power.
What All Of This Means For You
Becoming better at this thing that we call negotiating is something that we all want to do. Where we often run into problems is in finding out just exactly how to develop the negotiating skills that we know that we are going to need.
In order to do a better job of negotiating, we need to keep in mind what we are trying to accomplish: reaching a deal with the other side. Searching for that better deal at all times will make us a better negotiator. Power is a key part of any principled negotiation and we need to realize that no matter the circumstances that we’re negotiating in, we always have more power than we realize.
Becoming a better negotiator is not something that happens overnight. Instead, we need to understand what it takes to be more successful and then we need to work at developing those skills. Search for better deals and use the power that you have to do an even better job the next time that you negotiate!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™
Question For You: How can you get the other side to help you to search for a better deal for both of you?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
The ultimate goal of any negotiation is to be able to walk away from the table with the feeling that you were able to get what you came for. The trick is trying to understand just exactly how you can make that feeling happen. It turns out that the secret to conducting a successful negotiation depends not so much on what you do during the negotiation, but rather on what you do before the negotiations even starts…