Today the topic of our discussion is – Negotiation.

A complex but most important and relevant topic. Understanding negotiation is half the job done. The balance is in successful execution of the negotiation strategies.

Many of us dread negotiation, not recognizing that we negotiate on a regular, even daily basis. Most of us face formal negotiations throughout our personal and professional lives: discussing the terms of a job offer with a recruiter, haggling over the price of a new car, hammering out a contract with a supplier.

Then there are the more informal, less obvious negotiations we take part in daily: persuading a toddler to eat his food, working out a conflict with a coworker, or convincing a client to accept a late delivery.

“Like it or not, you are a negotiator … Everyone negotiates something every day,” write Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton in their seminal book on negotiating, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In.

Today, I will attempt to decode this subject by putting a simple framework which serves the purpose.

But First Lets understand What is Negotiation?

The authors of Getting to Yes define negotiating as a “back-and-forth communication designed to reach an agreement when you and the other side have some interests that are shared and others that are opposed.”

This is perfectly defined. We all know Negotiation is complex, it is nothing but a communication designed to reach an agreement which brings us to the next question?

Remember the PEARLS of Negotaition. PEARLS is an Acronym which for:

Perception, Emotion, Attitude, Resistance, Likability, Seal the deal

Perception - The customer with whom you are negiotiating should always have a positive perception about yiou, the company, the solution, the overall deal. He should feel that he is getting a good bargain at the price at which he is buying. As long as the perception is positive Negotiation is in your control

Emotion – We will negotiating with humans and when humans are involved there is bound to have positive and negative emotions – Anger, Ego, fear, excitement etc. These emotions need to be well balanced – specially the EGO and handled well. Emotions play a major role in negotiations and many of them fail due to poor handling of customer emotions

Attitude – Always enter in to negotiation with a win and positive attitude. An attitude to solve the problem, give the best solution. People see through you easily and if the attitude is to only win without any consideration for customer problems and their solutions then you know how this negotiation will go through

Resistance – The customer will have very high resistance at the start of the negotiation and it is the responsibility of the sales champion to reduce the resistance – here the resistance can be of price, service, contract, quality etc as the discussion goes on and by the end of the discussion the resistance should come to zero

Likability – You all have heard of this; people do business with people they like. This is so true in negotiation. If on the liking scale a sales champion is very low then the customer will be hesistant to trust and negotiate any further. Improve the credibility and trust aspect and this will make it easy to negotiatie

Seal the deal – Last but not the least once you have done systematically all the above the negotiation becomes successful and the deal is closed

I follow the PEARLS of negotiation religiously and this has helped in winning more contracts and getting customers for life.