Negotiation Skills in 7 simple steps. Clare Dignall

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       Step 2

       PREPARE YOUR STRATEGY

      ‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.’ — Benjamin Franklin, (1704–1790), Politician, Inventor and Scientist

       Five ways to succeed

       Five ways to fail

       Create your negotiation strategy

      You’ve spent valuable time preparing for negotiations: gathering information and identifying what you want and what you can concede to reach a satisfactory agreement. Now it’s time to distil your efforts into a negotiation strategy: not a fixed plan, but a flexible guideline of what you hope to achieve and how you aim to act along the way.

      Your strategy should consider the following, many of which you’ll have identified already from your preparation in Step 1:

       Make your strategy watertight

      For your strategy to be in with a fighting chance it must be both realistic and informed. To knock it into shape, you can’t think about your negotiation strategy in isolation, but must understand the context in which you’ll use it.

       Am I in the right ballpark?

      To create a realistic negotiation proposal, find out as much as you can about the goal that you seek. Say, for example, you’re applying for a new job with prospects, but whose salary is just too low for you to start on, and you plan to negotiate it up if you get it. To create a workable strategy, first find out what your own ‘market value’ is, to avoid setting your sights too low or too high. You might check comparable positions on recruitment websites or in newspaper jobs pages, or speak to an adviser (at a job centre or a recruitment agency) for indicative salaries. Talk to (trusted) contacts who’ve negotiated pay to understand how their negotiated rise compared against what they’d hoped. If you’re representing a supplier company, the same applies; you must find out about your competitors’ prices before you set down your own in a negotiation strategy.

       Who has the most leverage?

      In negotiations ‘leverage’ is the term used to describe how much weight one party has in influencing how negotiations will turn out. Identifying how much leverage each party has will help you use your negotiation strategy effectively, and this discovery can be surprising. If you’re negotiating with a superior e.g. your boss, or a big corporate like your broadband provider, it’s easy to assume that they’ll have the most leverage, because they’re ‘higher up’ or ‘bigger’ than you, but this isn’t always the case.

      Say you’ve interviewed for a new job and been offered it, though you still enjoy your present job. You could, at this point, meet with your current boss to negotiate better pay, and be the party with the most leverage. Why? You can go into negotiations knowing that you’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain. If your boss cannot meet your ‘must-have’ requirements, then you’re in the lucky position of your ‘walk-away’ scenario being exactly that – you can walk into another job. Pulling this information out of the bag when negotiations reach an impasse wields great leverage. Your boss knows that if he/she cannot meet at least your ‘must-have’ requirements he/she’s likely to lose you, and recruitment costs both time and money. Negotiate costs with a big broadband provider that loudly advertises affordability and you, as a paying customer, have some leverage because you’ve identified better deals, are willing to move elsewhere to get them, and are happy to tell your friends to do so too.

       How do I stick to my walk-away points?

      The safety-net that lies under your entire strategy is your ability to walk away at any point, before you’re drawn by momentum into agreeing on less than your ‘must-haves’. Your walk-away points needn’t СКАЧАТЬ