Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Never Agree To the First Offer

Negotiation is one topic which plays an important role in our daily life which most of the times happens without the person knowing that it is happenning. Negotiation is part of our life be it renting an apartment, buying stuff for one's home, salary, getting your ideas through at your workplace or any other situation one can think off. Finally, in negotiation, there is no winner or loser but it is about arriving at a win-win situation for the buyer side & seller side. I found this article pretty interesting & lucid & one can get more articles from the website provided.

If you are the buyer, you will hear the seller ask for a lot more than you expected. If you are the seller, the buyer will offer you far less than you expected. The intention is to lower your expectations and thereby gain a concession without having to make one in return. Of course the risk is that you will be offended and enraged, refusing to have any further dealings with the other party.

It is important to note that the other party’s culture may dictate this tactic as standard practice. A German or American trading in China will grow accustomed to extreme proposals. If the culture in which you must operate dictates extreme opening offers, then you are recommended to blend in and take advice on how to play by their rules.

Experienced negotiators always start with their aspiration base – or opening offer. We should be prepared to negotiate even if we are presented with the most favourable deal of our life. Lets’ say you would like to sell a car and a couple approaches you offering what seems to be a very good deal –much more than you expected to get. If you shake hands immediately, you will trigger 2 kinds of thoughts in the other side’s mind, also known as buyer’s remorse:

1. We could have paid less – we shouldn’t have offered that much – we could have done better.
2. There is something wrong with the car.

Always negotiate! Research tells us that trading concessions is the most effective way to gain people’s commitment to a transaction. Negotiating concessions is the best way to ensure all round deal satisfaction.

The Negotiation Academy – http://www.negotiationeurope.com - (TNA) is a global negotiation consulting firm, and negotiation skills training provider. Committed to delivering best practice based negotiation solutions, TNA collaborates with clients to instil an organisational negotiation capability. With deep industry experience, global resources and a proven track record, TNA is ideally positioned to assist clients in achieving optimal negotiation results in the domains of sales negotiation training and procurement negotiation training.

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