What’s the biggest challenge you faced? What are we up against here? What do you see as being the most difficult thing to get around?
A few years ago, I stumbled upon the book How to Become a Rainmaker,3 and I like to review it occasionally to refresh my sense of the emotional drivers that fuel decisions. The book does a great job to explain the.
SECTION II: SUMMARY Summarize and write out in just a couple of sentences the known facts that have led up to the negotiation.
What I am saying is that while our decisions may be largely irrational, that doesn’t mean there aren’t consistent patterns, principles, and rules behind how we act. And once you know those mental patterns, you start to see ways to influence them.
Why are you there? What do you want? What do they want? Why?
The chance for loss incites more risk than the possibility of an equal gain.
No” is not failure. Used strategically it’s an answer that opens the path forward.
Most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals.
No matter how much research our team has done prior to the interaction, we always ask ourselves, “Why are they communicating what they are communicating right now?
Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation.
My name is Chris. What’s the Chris discount?
Effective negotiators look for pieces of information, often obliquely revealed, that show what is important to their counterpart: Who is their audience? What signifies status and reputation to them? What most worries them? To find this information, one method is to go outside the negotiating table and speak to a third party that knows your counterpart. The most effective method is to gather it from interactions with your counterpart.
Kevin Dutton says in his book Split-Second Persuasion.
Good negotiators, going in, know they have to be ready for possible surprises; great negotiators aim to use their skills to reveal the surprises they are certain exist.
The Downs hijacking case came to epitomize everything not to do in a crisis situation, and inspired the development of today’s theories, training, and techniques for hostage negotiations.
Sentences like “It seems like you strongly value the fact that you’ve always paid on time” or “It seems like you don’t care what position you are leaving me in” can really open up the negotiation process.
Never be mean to someone who can hurt you by doing nothing.
The first step to achieving a mastery of daily negotiation is to get over your aversion to negotiating. You don’t need to like it; you just need to understand that’s how the world works. Negotiating does not mean browbeating or grinding someone down. It simply means playing the emotional game that human society is set up for.
No” creates safety, security, and the feeling of control.
One group of waiters, using positive reinforcement, lavished praise and encouragement on patrons using words such as “great,” “no problem,” and “sure” in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning: the average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70 percent more than of those who used positive reinforcement.