How to deal with fast-paced negotiations.

Fast-paced negotiations need agility not speed.

Google

By Stephen Kozicki

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Mahatma Gandhi

I have just returned from projects in Malaysia and Singapore. The region is fast paced, chaotic, and full of opportunities and pitfalls. When dealing with these opportunities and pitfalls I am surprised with how agile successful people and companies are.

Obviously in KL, the news topic was still the missing flight MH 370. There was much discussion around the slow response to the missing plane. Also around the multiple airline officials and government minister’s hasty responses.

Hasty responses often occur in critical negotiations. As the pace of the negotiation increases, there is an increasing danger of a hasty response instead of an agile response.

Successful management teams must become more sophisticated in their negotiations with key accounts. Management teams need to rethink and adapt their approaches for each major customer. Critical negotiations are a great place to learn agility over speed. Agility creates value and hasty responses descend very quickly into price discussions. 

The most powerful method we use to avoid hasty responses in live negotiations is preparing questions. Questions give you control over a fast-paced encounter and they allow you to manage the emotional responses to different approaches. The major benefit of questions is they prevent you making quick statements to defend your position. They also make you prepare better for negotiations with key accounts, you learn to look for real interests and not become blindsided by positions that people take.

Some of the best persuaders – salesmen, negotiators and psychiatrists – persuade with questions rather than statements. The power of questions to generate actions and commitment is well displayed in John Whitmore’s book Coaching for Performance. The only question to avoid is Why? During a negotiation this will produce only a defensive response because the other person sees it as a ‘blame’ question. Few people will answer this question truthfully and it often damages the rapport of a negotiation. Other ways to ask the why question are: what are your reasons for that? or how did you decide to do that? Some well know research in negotiation conducted many years ago showed skilled negotiators used questions twice as often as average negotiators.

To be agile in fast-paced negotiations, prepare good questions and you will avoid hasty responses that will lower your prices.

For unbiased, practical advice when planning for your next negotiation, contact us on +61 (02) 9450 1040 or Stephen@gordianbusiness.com.au. Please share any comments you have and subscribe to our blog at the top right of the page.

Chaotic changes requires agile responses

Google

by Stephen Kozicki 

The competitive market that we all operate within is changing fast; past successes are not predictors of future success. Your competition is changing and changing fast. The question is are you?

When we work on live negotiations we work hard with our clients to develop a strong value proposition; to know who the key decision makers across the table are and to find the best way to frame the value of the deal. A competitive advantage is now temporary; it is almost deal by deal.

Becoming more complex and chaotic is not just unique to business; it applies to cities and countries. Recently after a long period of economic decline, the city of Detroit filed for bankruptcy protection.  My American friends said that we all knew it was coming, but no one was agile enough or courageous enough to take a tough decision.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/detroit-bankruptcy/

When you read some of the comments from the Huffington Post the changes to the car industry did not happen overnight; the changes occurred over a period of time. Too often in business, we hope that the trends we see are not permanent or will not impact our business. Today they often do impact our business with disastrous results.

The purpose of this blog is not to unpack the demise of Detroit, but to ask you these questions:

• Are you seeing chaotic behaviours in your markets by top accounts or erratic competitors?
• Are you making decisions quickly enough?
• Are you agile like a small mountain goat or rigid as a big rock?

In your new operating environment to gain a new competitive approach you need to use your extensive knowledge of: your key decision makers and how you can frame value for them.

Our experience is that great global negotiators spend more time preparing for the negotiation than the average performer. I would assert that there was enough information 15 years ago to allow Detroit to prepare for the chaos ahead and start negotiating for a different outcome. For a long time competition in the car industry had been chaotic. In Detroit their response to tough global competition was to continually drop the price of the cars produced, which meant value suffered.

Your market and competitors will change quickly and often use price as a weapon. Be agile in your response. Don’t drop your prices to match your competitors, leverage value based on your total solution. To find out how to leverage your value in negotiations click here: http://www.gordianbusiness.com.au/negotiating-with-style/.

For unbiased, practical advice when planning for your next negotiation, contact us on +61 (02) 9450 1040 or Stephen@gordianbusiness.com.au. Please share any comments you have and subscribe to our blog at the top right of the page.