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.