Blog: The Negotiation Edge

You may not think that it’s easy to get the other side to bid against themselves. But you’d be wrong.

When you’re selling something, there’s a price point you have in mind. At the same time, your counterpart has their own general motivations when they come to the table. They have their own number in mind—or at least a range of numbers in mind—for what they’re willing to spend. And that’s what they’re focusing on.

If you want to get your counterpart to bid against themselves, you need to keep one thing in mind: The interaction is not about you—it’s about them.

Anchoring, or establishing a reference point in a negotiation, is a technique that can help you get the best deals. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Today, we’ll explore four rules of anchoring that can help you better understand how you can use this technique to get better deals.

There are four reasons that logrolling negotiation—a negotiation strategy that’s solely based on making trade-offs—is garbage

1. It’s a compromise.
2. It’s lazy.
3. It assumes a zero-sum game.
4. It lacks tactical empathy. 

How do you set a tone of collaboration that sticks—especially with someone that sees the negotiation as win-lose, and they want you to lose?

It’s easier than you might think. 

Cold calling: It might not be the most exciting thing to do, but in the world of sales, it comes with the territory. While cold calls are probably the least exciting part of sales, it comes with the territory.

After receiving an offer, you may be asking yourself, “How do I know I got everything that I could have gotten?”

Who knew hostage negotiation actually uses the same principles that apply to all negotiations?! Hostage negotiation started in the 1970s, before Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, before neuroscience, and before emotional intelligence. We thought we were dealing with an aspect of human behavior that was the exception to everyday life. What we didn’t know is that we were dealing with the essence of everyday life and had the rules for all negotiations. Here are those five rules for winning negotiations:

There’s one commonality that all effective negotiators share: they consciously make the decision to negotiate in their daily lives. It may sound simple, but deciding to negotiate in real-life situations demands stepping out of your comfort zone. In reality, it’s uncomfortable. When you decide to negotiate, you risk feeling weird or awkward, regardless of your age, intelligence, or experience level. Choosing to negotiate also means deciding to be present, to focus your attention, and to engage with your environment and your counterpart in a more deliberate way—all of which can be hard to muster if you’re tired or simply not in the mood.

The secret to gaining the upper hand in a negotiation is to give the other party the illusion of control. But how do you flip the control dynamic on its head?

How much time do you have to make a first impression? Seven seconds.