Among industries of all types and sizes, negotiation serves as the backbone of any successful business interaction. With customers saying “no” to a product or service an average of 6 times before finally saying “yes,” the only way to convert potential clients is through effective negotiation. When you develop and strengthen your negotiation skills, you not only give yourself a better chance at achieving favorable outcomes in specific deals, you also improve your business expertise in several significant ways.
Consider the information below to learn more about why negotiation skills are important, then contact Shapiro Negotiations to schedule training for your team so they can develop their negotiation skillset.
Cultivate Emotional Intelligence
Some people may consider emotions to be an obstacle when negotiating, but a truly masterful negotiator knows that emotional intelligence is just as vital to a negotiation as knowledge of the financial and practical aspects of the deal. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and control your emotions, as well as perceiving and appropriately responding to the emotions of others. Both positive and negative emotions play key roles in negotiation. Positive emotions, such as empathy and acceptance, improve decision-making abilities, encourage creative problem solving, reduce aggressive bargaining tactics, and support solutions that provide value to both parties. Negative emotions, such as anger or resentment, decrease cooperation, result in more frequent rejections, provoke win-lose bargaining tactics, and allow for fewer opportunities to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
Master Conflict Resolution
Conflict arises any time the perceptions, values, interests, or goals of two parties diverge, a frequent occurrence during business deals. To master conflict resolution, you must hone your emotional intelligence and employ the same skills you would use in an effective negotiation. This includes asking questions, active listening, reading body language, defining your objectives, clearly communicating your expectations, encouraging confidence and trust, cooperating, and working toward agreeable solutions. Conflicts occur internally between colleagues and externally with existing or potential clients, and both types require prompt resolution.
Learn To Be More Flexible
While some techniques can be useful when applied to nearly any negotiation, each negotiation is unique, and no strategy is guaranteed to work for everyone. From the very beginning of the process, successful negotiation requires careful analysis of a wide variety of factors to determine the specific dynamics of the deal. This ensures you select the right combination of techniques most likely to result in a successful outcome. To be the best negotiator, you must learn to be flexible, continuously evolving your strategy based on new or changing information. The more deals you handle, the more varied the situations will be, giving you extensive practice in adapting your tactics and resulting in constant improvement with the conclusion of every deal.
Reach A Win-Win Outcome
As the negotiation approach with the highest potential for satisfaction in both parties, the win-win approach or integrative negotiation is the only way to reach a mutually beneficial outcome. When both parties enter into a negotiation oriented toward a win-win approach, they cooperate, share information, collaborate, and work together to creatively problem solve. Along with defining your own objectives, it is crucial to consider the goals and priorities of your negotiating partner to guide your negotiation toward a win-win outcome. At the end of the negotiation, both parties should be confident that they gained value as a result of the deal and feel satisfied with the overall outcome.
Build Alliances
The finest negotiators do not only persuade others in their decision making; they also identify who else holds influence over important decisions and build alliances with these individuals. Alliances may be broad or long-term, founded on shared priorities, or temporary and short-term, created in the pursuit of precise goals. To manage your network of influences, you must determine who the real decision-makers are, establish who influences these individuals, understand the details of the decision-making process, and assess others based on their support or opposition to your goals. Just like in a negotiation, building alliances depends on recognizing the connections between various factors and using leverage to achieve your objective.
Help Your Team Members Become Master Negotiators
Shapiro Negotiations offers a comprehensive training program that provides businesses with proven methods for successfully handling negotiations, increasing productivity, and managing conflict. Based on scientific data and supported by experience, our strategic process provides an interactive, dynamic training experience to teach people in every kind of industry how to achieve profitable business agreements. For over two decades, we have helped more than 250,000 people develop skills for expertly handling negotiations and facilitated more than $2.5 billion in sales.
If you are interested in enhancing the negotiation abilities of your business team, contact us online today, call (410) 662-4764, or send an email to sni@shapironegotiations.com.
