We die. Everything else is negotiable. Even taxes — in some places, at least. I don’t know what you do for a living, but I know one thing for sure: you can’t get or lose as much with anything as you can with good or bad negotiating.
Let’s say you earn € 100 000 a year. If you work the usual almost 1680 hours a year, that makes an hourly wage of about € 58. When negotiating, you can earn that much in one second: imagine you buy a car for € 50,000. At the right moment, you use the right negotiation technique — just as you immediately choose the right key from a bunch of keys — and you get a discount of seven percent, i.e. € 3500. The negotiation lasted one minute and € 3500 divided by 60 seconds just makes € 58. There you go.
In other words, it pays to negotiate. To put it negatively: if you don’t negotiate, you will miss out on a great deal.
It’s not for nothing that they say there are two prices for everything: the negotiator’s and the douchebag’s.Jack Nasher
It’s not just sales and purchasing that negotiate: in fact, every discussion is a negotiation about who’s right. We negotiate about 40 hours a week and our lives and those of our company could be so much better if we knew how.
When you’re managing people, consider what’s slipping through your fingers even in the few minutes you’re reading this article: Not only do your employees make bad deals, but you say “yes” when they should have said “no.” And many will think that good negotiators need to be tough as nails and merciless — ask Lidl how well that did their purchasing department (spoiler: not well). They say the profit is in the buying. That’s nonsense. The profit lies in well-negotiated purchasing, just as it lies in good sales. Professional negotiation is a matter for the boss in every company. Our Negotiation Institute recommends three steps:
STEP 1: HOW TO NEGOTIATE?
Find out how negotiations are conducted in your company. To do this, use a combination of four methods: simple surveys, observations of negotiations, interviews, and focus groups to go in-depth and really understand the company’s negotiation weaknesses but also strengths.
STEP 2: DEVELOP A NEGOTIATION STRATEGY
It is crucial that it is also worthwhile for everyone in the company to negotiate. If you’re only concerned about sales and not about profit, there’s no need to negotiate. The important thing is to set up the incentive structure in such a way that everyone is pulling in the same direction and speaking the same language. If you want to measure success precisely, you can also introduce a balanced scorecard in which factors relevant to you are listed. In any case, it is important that you can record the before-and-after effect and evaluate the measures at any time.
STEP 3: NEGOTIATION TRAINING
Invest in excellent negotiation training. Don’t make the mistake of training only sales or only purchasing. The more diverse the group, the better — everyone can learn from everyone else. The buyer who sits one office away can help the salesperson immensely, because he or she ticks like the buyer the salesperson also regularly sits across from, and vice versa. Don’t think that training is all it takes. Regular refreshers, even if only once a year, help solidify what you’ve learned. Employees love negotiation training: it’s eye-opening, it’s very fun thanks to simulations, and it benefits everyone in every area of life — professional and personal. Negotiation helps individuals realize their personal potential in life, just as it helps a company shine at its fullest. An impulse lecture on this can be the initial spark to draw attention to the topic and arouse curiosity (cough).
Published in Speakers Excellence