When achieving your business goals, being skilled in negotiation can work strongly in your favour. Whether you would like to win a new contract to drive revenue for your business; work with a supplier to reduce your costs and increase your margins; or work with a problem customer to overcome potential legal ramifications; you can be sure that being a dextrous negotiator will work strongly to your advantage.

Define Your Goals

When you are entering negotiation on behalf of your business, make sure you understand the goals that you would like to achieve, and also how important each individual goal is. When you understand this, it's far easier to be able to make concessions in other areas should the need arise. You should ensure that all key decision makers agree with the material points that you would like to achieve.

Think About Their Goals

Start to think about what the other party would like to achieve, and what their core focus is. When you understand this, you will be in a far better position to make offers that they will seriously consider. Far too often in negotiation, negotiators are far too focused on their business goals to consider how they could offer advantages to the party that they are negotiating with.

During this stage of the process, thinking outside of the box can work extremely well in your favour. To give an example of out-of-the-box thinking, let's imagine that a marketing business is negotiating with another business over how much they are willing to pay for the provision of IT services. The companies can not agree on a price, and they are stuck in deadlock. The IT services firm is about to lose a large contract. What if the IT services company decided to start using the marketing business as their agency instead of their current one? The marketing agency will pick up a new customer, and the IT services firm will not lose anything – they will be paying the same price for their services, but the money will go to their new client, rather than to their existing agency.

Thinking About Plan B

When either party makes it clear that they have to succeed with negotiation, and the other party doesn't, then one has a clear advantage. You should never appear to be too desperate to get things done, or this may make the other party feel they have a strong advantage.

If you feel the other party needs things just as much as you, or more, then you may wish to use the tactic of explaining what will happen when negotiations do not go ahead successfully. Different negotiators will use different approaches during this stage in the negotiation. Some people will try to be threatening, and may mention legal ramifications (if applicable) or the detrimental affect this will have on the other parties business if things don't go through; others will try to coyly suggest that they may have to walk away. Whatever approach you decide to take during the negotiation process, make sure you always have a plan b.

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