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What’s your basic approach to a negotiation? Do you slide in silently, prepared for a long drawn-out battle just hoping that through the use of the correct negotiation styles and negotiating techniques you’ll be the one who wears down the other side first in order to be able to walk away with the best deal? Or do you show up with bells on, the ultimate showman, and try to charm the other side into seeing things your way? It turns out that this second way is the way that will product the best results…
When Negotiating, It’s Time For A Show
What would your perfect negotiation look like? Would you breeze into the negotiating room, smile, lay out your proposal and have the other side instantly accept it? If this is what you’d like to have happen, then you had better spend some time working on your showmanship because that’s what it’s going to take in order to make something that looks like what you want to happen.
What we need to realize as negotiators is that our main job in any negotiation is to get across to the other side of the table our ideas. What we want to do is to convince them that our ideas are good and that they should just accept them as they are.
In order to make this happen, we need to learn how to be showmen (and showwomen). Through experimentation, what we need to do is to find out what techniques are the most persuasive. We do need to be careful here. It turns out that there is a very fine line between showmanship and hype.
Practical Showmanship Tips For Everyday Negotiations
If there is this delicate balance between hype and showmanship, how can we as negotiators be careful to not step over the line? What we need to do is to understand who we’ll be talking with. What is it going to take to both capture their attention and impress them?
One of the easiest ways to display your showmanship is to take the time to create professional looking presentations. No matter if you are showing a product or a building site to the other side, having good drawings and allowing them to be able to picture what might be can go a long way in moving them towards agreeing with you.
In addition, how you dress can have a big impact on how the other side sees you. What you want to do is to dress appropriately for the people that you’ll be meeting with. The key here is to remember that even in the world of showmanship, first impressions can be lasting impressions.
What All Of This Means For You
In order to be a successful negotiator, you need to find ways to get your ideas across to the other side of the table. Your goal is to get them to accept your ideas. In order to make this happen, some showmanship is going to be required.
In a principled negotiation, showmanship can take on many different forms. These can include bringing well-known figures to the table with you and creating fancy models of what could be. There are practical ways to go about bringing showmanship to a negotiation. These include knowing how best to dress for negotiation meetings and creating professional looking visuals can go a long way.
It is important for negotiators to always keep in mind that the other side is always forming opinions of you. That’s why first impressions can create lasting impressions and so by bringing some showmanship to the negotiating table you can win the other side over and reach a better deal faster.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Negotiating Skills™
Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to take the showmanship thing too far?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
If you think of a negotiation as a process that flows from beginning to end, then the first part of the process has to be preparation. We all know that it is not necessary to prepare for a negotiation – we probably know people who have just jumped into a negotiation without properly preparing (perhaps it was you) and we know how that negotiation turned out – not so good. However, none of us ever has enough time so is all of this negotiating homework really necessary?