Negotiating win-win deals is the key to many sales veterans’ stellar performance. Charles Knadler, president and CEO of EnerBank, a leader in home improvement lending, recently offered these tips for negotiating agreements that leave both sides happy on business2community.com.
Do your research. Determine as best you can what the negotiating party is looking for. You will typically have multiple people within your company who have interacted with them. Ask them to offer opinions on what they think the negotiating party’s goals are. More knowledge will help you once the negotiating gets underway.
Listen. It’s critical once you get into the negotiations to gather more information before diving into the actual bargaining. Use open-ended questions to truly understand what the negotiating party is trying to get. If you assumed you had a weak bargaining spot, you might find out your position is stronger than you think or vice versa. Sometimes you can even find out information that can be beneficial for both parties.
Know the best alternative. It’s critical in negotiating to understand your top alternative to a negotiated agreement in order to determine what’s the worst you’re willing to accept. You never want to agree to something that’s worse than not doing anything. On the flip side, it’s important to understand the negotiating party’s top alternative to an agreement. You need to know what makes sense for them to accept so that you’re not wasting time presenting them something that’s clearly less attractive than no agreement at all.
Give the other side a story to tell. Think about the message the negotiating party is going to take back to his or her boss. You can essentially help them write their winning speech. Spelling it out makes a person more likely to accept it because they may be focusing too much on the complexity of the deal. While they may or may not have gotten everything they wanted, you’re able to both give them enough and then help them tell the positive aspects of it to their leaders.
