Читать книгу Negotiating - David Brown, David Brown - Страница 9

Whether we seek to impose a decision on someone, or leave things flexible, or negotiate, depends on the other party as much as on us. If you are to succeed, whatever you decide to do must depend to a large extent on who you are dealing with.

These are some of the things that you need to consider about the other party when negotiating:

 Expectations. What are their expectations going to be? Why do they have those expectations?

 Behaviour. How will they expect you to behave? How will they behave? Are they naturally aggressive, or conciliatory? Will they make

case study I used to negotiate regularly with an Indian family that had a significant position within the aluminium industry in Europe. Whichever member of the family I negotiated with, I needed to recognize that they would always inflate the volumes that they were going to take in order to get the best price. They talked big and took a lot smaller. I had to develop a strategy that coped with this. One tactic I used was to go right back to square one with a fresh package for the reduced volume. That was not well received. Instead I made sure that my concessions on specification and price were still going to be acceptable to me when the volumes inevitably started to reduce, and I built that into my first package.

extreme demands or will they be more reasonable? Will they react in a logical way or will they expect you to behave in a particular way, because that’s the way you have behaved in the past? If you suddenly behave differently, how will they react – will it increase or reduce your chances of reaching agreement?

 Culture. What culture do they come from? We will return to this in 1.6, and elsewhere – because understanding their background is a vital part of understanding what will appeal to them and what will turn them off. This will be the difference between success and failure.

 Preferences. Will they want to negotiate one-on-one or will they turn up as a team? Is the other party likely to see the world through positive or negative eyes? Is their glass half full or half empty? Do they look at the big picture or the detail?

 Pressures. Even if they turn up on their own, has their boss exerted pressure on them to get a particular result? If there are such pressures on the other party, I would call this ‘having a monkey on their back’ and you need to be aware of it.

 Options. How important are you to them? How important is it for them to reach agreement? What’s their best alternative to reaching agreement?

Understand who you are dealing with and be sensitive about them and their situation.