Tips to Improve Your Negotiation Skills
Growing your business will rely heavily on your negotiation skills. As a business owner, it is always a good idea to work to improve your ability in this area. Here are a few tips to improve your skills and land better deals:
Why Negotiations Fail
The first tip in knowing how to improve your skills is to know why negotiations normally fail including:
- Overconfidence — People do not practice negotiating once they have a few successful deals under their belt.
- Failure to See the Other Side — Negotiating is all about flexibility and compromise. Improving requires you to learn how to listen more, and talk less during a deal.
- Narrow Scope of Victory — Negotiations should not be viewed as only a win or lose situation. The best deals are made when everyone wins in some aspect.
Things to Do
In order to get better, you want to make sure you practice the following aspects of negotiating:
- Evaluate and know your leverage points
- Create a detailed list of costs so you know your bare minimum
- Determine your deal points
- Encourage the other party to reveal their offer first
- Ask a lot of questions and work on understanding what the other party wants to achieve
Things Not to Do
In a similar fashion, you want to make sure you do not do the following to make sure your negotiations go the way you want:
- Be afraid to have a bottom dollar amount
- Make offers without contingencies or escape clauses
- Be afraid to walk away from a deal
- Let emotion get the better of you
Following BATNA
The final tip to improve negotiating skills comes with the following “Best alternatives to negotiated agreements.” This means you want to make sure you know when an offer is not giving you what you need and find ways to turn the agreement in your favor. The best way to have a successful negotiation is to go into the deal with different alternate offers available if your desired one is rejected. Never reveal to the other party that you have alternatives in mind because you are less likely to end with your preferred agreement.
When you follow these tips, you will naturally see your negotiating skills improve. Your business needs to be able to grow, but other businesses want to do the same. Keep the other party in mind when you create your hard lines, but always know your costs and true goals before you settle on any agreement.
