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Slow down
When people want to move negotiations forward quickly, when they feel an urgency for time, it’s not really as much the urgency for time but their need to get things done. As soon as you engage in a negotiation with an effective process that makes progress it makes time less important. People find themselves on a gerbil wheel doing the same negotiations over and over and over again without actually making any progress. So the counterintuitive thing about this type of approach to negotiation is that it’s a delay to save time. You’ll find you have fewer conversations that last a little longer and make more progress every time than the constant repetitive conversations that get nowhere – the 20 phone calls of three to five minutes in length where you never actually get anything done. So the idea here is to make your process much more effective, actually make progress, and use these skills so that you understand what’s going on. And also the big killer of profit is renegotiation and bad implementation. So the more effective you are by slowing it down upfront, the less money is wasted on the back end trying to fix bad deals.
Re-engage to re-start
Trying to re-engage in a way that lets the other side know in a very non-threatening fashion that it’s time to make a decision, or let this go, is really important. And you’re not walking away in a threatening way you’re just telling people like, “Look if this doesn’t work for you let’s let it go.” That’s the message that you’re trying to get across. And the best messages in any given negotiation are really implied indirectly, come to the other person based on thinking that you’re getting them to do, getting them to get some really solid thought behind their answers. And so a great thing to send someone in an email is, “Have you given up on this project?” Because nobody likes to give up on anything, and at the same time nobody wants to say “yes” to that because they don’t know what they’re letting themselves in for when they say “yes.”
You know, and it’s interesting because that particular email has restarted negotiations that have seen dead silence for weeks prior to that. And in many cases, you can get a response within three to five minutes of reading the email or the text. That’s a great way to get things restarted. Now the problem with that is there’s a really good chance you contributed to the silence in the first place. And your next move, when they respond, is you’ve got to get a “That’s right” out of them next. Because they have to feel like their communication is being paid attention to.
Concede to win
So an interesting question is: How do you treat one-off negotiations versus people that you deal with on a regular basis? The first thing is make the hypothesis that there’s no such thing as a one-off. If you’re talking to someone you’re going to talk to them again. So it’s exceptionally rare instances that we have one-off negotiations. And even if you think it’s a one-off with a car salesman you’re going to come back to the car dealership to get them to work on your car. So the more negotiations you treat as if you need to live with this person and live with the outcome, then the question is: Do we concede? Do we make them feel like they won because we want a good relationship?
Well, the flip side answer to that is: Who do you want to make feel like they lost? Why does anybody want to have a negotiation where they feel like they lost? Because they’re not going to implement, they’re going to resent, and it’s just not good for you to beat the other side. So, the tactical empathy approach is, maybe they didn’t get the terms that they originally thought that they wanted, but they felt like that they were treated with respect, tt was a fair outcome, and you heard everything they had to say. And they were understood at least. So the issue of winning and losing really needs to fall away to: Was this a great collaboration where we were both better off and I was treated with respect? Because if I feel like I was treated disrespectfully I’m going to make you pay. And you’re going to lose the profit that you would have made in that deal otherwise because implementation is going to be a nightmare. So no matter how close we are to someone I don’t think we want anyone to feel like they’ve lost after-the-fact, because resentment is not conducive to ongoing long-term profitable relationships.