Knowing how to negotiate

If you want to know how to negotiate well just observe a child who wants something. Even if they’ve been told ‘No’ they will try again … and again … and again. As they get more sophisticated they won’t just ask out right for it, they will find different ways to get their point across. They may even say something like “If I wash the car for a month can I have ….”. The main thing you will notice is that they DON’T GIVE UP.

In life everybody negotiates about almost everything. It’s just we don’t always realise it and that’s the problem. We often think that negotiating happens at specific times, such as between customers and suppliers, but that’s not the whole story. What happens when you and your friends want to go out for the evening? There is a lot of negotiating that goes on around when and where you are going and with whom.

Negotiations in practice are a messy, almost chaotic, experience. Human beings are given to wandering attention, digressions, circular arguments, repetition, interruptions, cross-talk, irrelevancies, and a whole range of emotional responses from the passive sulk to the violent outburst.

What’s the worst thing you can do to a negotiator? Be rude? No … accept his or her first offer. Why is that? Well if someone accepts your first offer you start to wonder how high they would have been willing to go. On the other side you start to wonder if you really got a bargain.

What’s the negotiator’s most useful question? If you put the words “What if…” in the front of every question.

Can you believe it?

I was at a networking lunch recently and one of the ladies is a mortgage advisor. We had the normal networking conversation around what we do and how we find business. The whole thing took an unexpected turn when I explained how I was finding more people asking me for help because they were being asked to do a presentation as part of the interview process.

She suddenly became excited and said “Oh I wish you’d been able to help my son because he had to do one for a part-time job last week”. Imagining that he was going to be speaking to groups of people on behalf of a charity or as part of a youth training scheme I was shocked when she told me what he had actually applied to do.

He’s a university student and he dropped his CV in to a local company on the off-chance that they might want some part-time staff. They called him a week later and asked him to go in to see them. As part of the interview he had to ‘sell them an ashtray’ and then do a formal presentation.

The job he was applying for…

… was at the checkout in Blockbuster!

So, if you know ANYONE who is going for an interview in the near future tell them to brush up on their presentation skills

Getting Your Timing Right

Is your timing right?

Recently I've been contacted by people needing some urgent help with presentations. They've found themselves in a situation where their future prospects hinge on the success of a presentation.

It's bad enough having to make a presentation if it's not something you do regularly. When your whole future is riding on the outcome it puts you under additional pressure.

Fortunately they came to me with enough time to be able to do something about it. I was able to help by giving them some tools to control their nerves and tips on how to improve their performance.

The main key to their success was getting their timing right. We completely rewrote their presentations so that they were able to get their points across within the allotted time. This was crucial as one of them had not even made her main point before she ran out of time using her original script!

The trick is to decide what message you want to get across to your audience. You then structure your presentation so you have a clear beginning and ending with 3 key supporting points in the middle. You MUST practice saying it so that you can time how long it takes and if it is too long remove some of the material.

Someone told me recently that 200 words take about 5 minutes to deliver. This is probably a good rule of thumb, although it does depend on how quickly you speak!

Remember - good timing shows professionalism and courtesy towards your audience and other speakers, if there are any, so it is a critical part of your preparation. Don't leave anything to chance - rehearse it.