7 Proven Strategies for Mastering Negotiation

As you may painfully know from personal experience, negotiation isn’t something that comes naturally for many people. It’s a skill that takes much trial and error—and many successes and failures—to get better at. As the owner of a business for the past 20-plus years, according to the author, he continues to learn lessons every day. Here are seven lessons he has learned about this delicate dance called negotiation.

1. Prepare thoroughly, but be ready to improvise.  Yes, you should know your cold numbers. Equally important is understanding the human on the other side of the table.
2. Listen more than you speak.  According to the author when he was growing up in a small town in Georgia, he used to hear a saying that is 100 percent applicable to any negotiation situation: “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.” Instead of always being on the offensive with arguments and lots of talk, take time to listen to what the other person has to say. That silence after asking a good question? It’s golden. Let them fill it.
3. Focus on interests, not positions.  Imagine a situation where your landlord is insisting on a 15 percent rent increase. That’s a lot of money, and you might find yourself at an impasse. It’s then that you should dig deeper to find out what’s driving the other person’s position. You might discover, for example, that your landlord’s real concern is covering rising maintenance costs. By restructuring your agreement to include shared responsibility for certain repairs, you’ll both get what you need. The stated position was about the percentage, but the interest was actually about predictable expenses.
4. Build rapport and trust.  Business deals might be built on contracts, but they’re sealed by trust.
5. Master the art of strategic concessions.  Think of concessions as breadcrumbs you drop along a path, not the whole loaf. According to the author, in his most successful negotiations, he prepared several tiers of possible concessions in advance, and  he had them ready to hand out when necessary. Know what you can give, when to give it, and what you expect in return. Sometimes, the most powerful move is offering the concession before they even ask.
6. Manage emotions—yours and theirs.  It’s easy—and potentially destructive—to let emotions throw a negotiation off track. That’s happened more than once or twice for the author when he took a dismissive comment personally. The flash of anger that followed derailed everything. So, when you feel that heat is rising, take a sip of water and mentally count to five. Simple? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
7. Always seek win-win solutions.  When you’re negotiating a deal, your job isn’t to make sure you win and the other person loses. That’s a sure way to destroy trust. The best negotiations are win-win negotiations in which each of you walks away feeling like you got something you wanted—the outcome was a fair one for both of you. Negotiation isn’t just about getting the deal (sure, that’s important). It’s also about creating a long-term business relationship—one in which you’re not just closing deals, but also opening doors.