Blog: The Negotiation Edge

“The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don’t know you’re in.” What hidden negotiations drain your time (your most valuable commodity) each and every day? 

When a woman sits down at the negotiating table, her counterpart may harbor a number of preconceived notions about her, sometimes consciously but frequently not. Though it certainly doesn’t feel fair because these stereotypes have nothing to do with you as the woman at the table, you will nevertheless need to guard against them to get the results she’s aiming for.

At the end of the day, people like doing business with people they like. 

This is why it’s so important to build rapport as quickly as you can whenever you sit down at the table. Once you’ve established rapport, you’re well on your way to the trust-based influence that is needed to achieve the outcomes you’re hoping for.

The first time I ever handled a hostage negotiation, the whole thing was over in five minutes. I thought that negotiation was easy and that I was a natural.

The Black Swan Group’s Negotiation 9™ (N9™) are the nine skills that make it easy to achieve Tactical Empathy™ (TE™) —the best way to accomplish trust-based influence, which should be your primary goal every time you step to the table. 

If we’ve learned one thing during COVID-19, it’s that it’s not that hard to maintain already-established relationships virtually. But what about establishing brand-new relationships in virtual environments? In short, it’s a much bigger challenge.

You enter a negotiation. What if there’s a Black Swan-trained ninja on the other side?

In such a scenario, you’re most likely dealing with one of three tactics:

1. How am I supposed to do that?
2. A No-oriented question™ 
3. Some sort of Label™ (that’s giving you a bad feeling)

This blog was originally published on 5/28/2018 and updated on 9/10/2020.

When you’re responding to a counterproposal, you need to make sure you don’t get sucked into a game of sequential moves. When such a game is played between evenly matched players and you go second, you can only tie or lose. 

Are you interested in playing a more complicated game of tic-tac-toe?

In the following post, we’ll walk you through three things to keep in mind when you’re responding to a counterproposal:

How can you practice negotiation skills by yourself? 

Read on to learn how to build yourself into an elite negotiator using a technique great athletes use: visualization.

Everyone wants to get to the decision maker (the DM). They’re the person we need to persuade to get what we want, after all.

But the decision maker isn’t always at the table when we are. Here are three tips that will make you much more effective when you find yourself in that scenario.