Negotiate for What You Want

Even the most persuasive person in the world can sometimes fail to get what they want. You may have presented your case in a logical manner, listened to their doubts – and the other person can still refuse to agree with you. Now it’s time to negotiate.

Negotiation is simply what you do when you need to make trade-offs to come to an agreement with someone else who initially does not agree with you. To begin with, the other person may not be willing to give you what you want – or you may not be willing to give them what they want.

It’s a key skill for helping you achieve your career goals – for example when you’re changing jobs and negotiating a salary and benefits package, or when you are bargaining over the price of a product or service. And here’s how to do it in five steps.

1. Determine your objectives

Negotiation is often pictured as psychological warfare – two sides sticking rigidly to their positions, trying to avoid conceding for fear of ‘losing face’, and bitterly
wearing the other side down in the hopes of ‘winning’.

But it will be far more useful for you if you can look at it as a process whereby you trade off some of your more superficial wants to ensure that you get what you need.

So, prepare by working out in your own mind:

• What do you want? What, in an ideal world, would you like to get out of the discussion?
• What do you need? What is the minimum that you are willing to accept?
• Why should the other party give you what you want? What are the reasons or justifications to back up your demands?
• What minor concessions are you willing to make to ensure you both get an agreement?

Let’s take a salary negotiation as an example. You’ve decided that you would like to work for Company X and they have offered you a salary of £36,000. In an ideal world, you’d like a salary of £42,000. But you realize that you want very much to work for this company – so would actually be willing to put up with a salary of only £38,000 because the job would be such good experience for your long-term career.

2. Identify the other person’s position

When you meet the other party, you need to explain your position – based on your wants and the reasons behind those wants.

Then you need to ask some questions to find out what they are willing to offer you in return.

3. Look for common ground

In order to show that the negotiation isn’t a battle and that you’re not just arguing for the sake of being difficult, it’s worth taking a few minutes to emphasize what you already agree on.

For example, in the salary negotiation, you might say something like: ‘We’ve established that I’d like to work here and that you would like me to work here too.’

4. Agree compromises

Now that you’ve established each other’s initial wants, you can probe a bit further to find out why they have made the offer they are making. You could, for example, ask: ‘Can I ask you why you won’t go higher/lower?’

And once they explain their reasons, you can suggest some conditions to getting an agreement, using questions such as:

• ‘I understand that, but I can’t do X – but what if I do Y instead?’
• ‘What if I were to do X – would you do Y in return?’
• ‘I’m willing to concede X, but would you do Y for me instead then?’

5. Close the deal

There’s nothing worse than leaving a negotiation only to receive a written offer that doesn’t match up to what you thought you’d bargained for! So check that you both agree by summarizing what has happened.

Finally, this is the stage when the paperwork and legal stuff gets handled. If it’s a job that you’re negotiating around, you should expect a written contract. Or if it’s around payment for a product or service, perhaps a purchase order or invoice will be necessary.

Remember to...

• Prepare as much as you can before meeting people – you only have about three minutes to impress them, so don’t screw it up.
• Keep in mind the different styles of persuading people to give you what you want – remember that no one style is right all of the time.
• But don’t waste energy arguing with people who won’t give you what you want. Invest some thought in how you will negotiate with them instead.