If you really needed to persuade someone to do something for you, could you do it? Say, for instance, you need to persuade a colleague to help you with a project you are about to start, but you know that they are really busy and may not want to take on extra duties. Or you’ve a report you’d like proofreading and the only person qualified to do it is off on their holidays at the end of the day. Could you persuade them to do it for you before they go? This situation requires the fine art of negotiation and, luckily for you, even if you don’t have the skills needed, you can learn them easily.
One of the best known negotiating methods is called the Persuasion Tools Model. This involves looking at the influencing skills and intuition you already possess and matching them up with the negotiating tool that suits you best.
Before we move on, I think I should explain what’s meant by intuition in this context. Intuition is your ability to understand how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. This helps as it’s allow you to decide the best place to use certain tactics in the negotiation. For example, do you think you’d be able to determine when someone is about to agree to your suggestion? Or use their underlying motivations to persuade them that your idea is best? This is where an understanding of body language may also come in handy!
The basis of the Persuasion Tools Model is this table:
So, the table helps you work out the best persuasion technique for you. First, you’ll need to decide how good you are at using your intuition and how well you think you can persuade or influence people. For example, if you think your level of intuition is low, but you think you are good at influencing others, you should use a logical approach to negotiation. However, if you think you are not good at influencing others and have a low level of intuition, you should opt for a compromising approach.
Now you’ve decided which approach is best for you, we’ll examine each of them in turn with examples of how they work.
Bargaining – this is one of the easiest and most popular methods of negotiating as you do not need to be very good at influencing. But, you do need to have good intuition. For example, you want to buy 100 boxes of photocopy paper for your office. However, you have a strict budget and you need to get the sales representative to drop the price by 20 per cent. During the conversation you sense that the rep really wants your business, (maybe he works on commission?) so you ask for 30 percent off the price and then negotiate down until you reach 20 per cent.
Emotion – As you can see from the table, using emotion requires you to have a high level of influencing skills and great intuition too. You’ll need to understand the emotions and feelings of the people you are negotiating with and what the underlying motivations of their business are. For example, you are pitching for a contract to provide dinners for the children at a nursery school. Your offer is no cheaper, and your service is no better than the other companies who are pitching, but you offer locally sourced, organic food for the same price. You can use this in your negotiation, by pointing out the benefits of eating organic and buying local. However, this will only work if the nursery you are pitching to is interested in feeding their kids organic, locally sourced food. If all they care about is getting the lowest quote, this approach will not work.
Okay, I think that’s enough for this week. We’ll cover the last two approaches next week. In the meantime, if you have any other negotiating techniques that you think are effective, let me know.
Thanks to Mind Tools for the image Persuasion Tools Model
