From the course: Negotiation Skills

Get to win-win with tradables

From the course: Negotiation Skills

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Get to win-win with tradables

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- The ideal objective of a negotiation is to get a win-win outcome, one where both parties are not just happy, but one where both parties are actually better off than they were before the negotiation. This happens when you find tradables that are easy for one person to give, but valuable to the other person. If it costs you almost nothing to recommend my training course to a friend, but it's valuable to me, and I give you some money off because of that, then, between us, we've created some value out of nowhere. We've both gained and it's a win-win negotiation. Other examples might be you booking training further ahead, which makes your life simpler and my future income feel more secure, and I'd give you money for that, and we've both gained. Even you providing curry for lunch on a training course could be a win-win. It's my favorite food. It makes my life significantly better to have it, and it costs you no more than any other option. In fact, it might even be a bit cheaper. So maybe we could both gain from that. You can see that win-win is all about the tradables. When you start thinking about it, pretty much everything is a tradable. Mentions on websites, payment terms, where meetings are held. You might not care about this, and it might make a big difference to me, and it could be things like always being asked to quote or being a recommended supplier or exclusivity. So the key is not to be scrabbling for trading ideas under pressure during the negotiation, but to have planned ahead with a nice big list of tradables, and then explore lots of those when you're actually in the negotiation. Then, when you open wide, and there's a big gap to be made up by using lots of trades, you can make lots of those trades so that when you finally reach agreement in the middle, you've just got all the things you wanted and given away quite a few of the things that you can easily give. Why do you want to give away those tradables that you can easily give? Well, because they're easy for you to give, and if they have value to the other party, then you can get money or other tradables in return and end up gaining by that exchange. So when you negotiate, do you trade or do you just fight them over the money? Could you try a bit of trading? Thinking about what you can easily offer them and what you can ask them for that would be easy for them to give you. Can you imagine having a negotiation where you actually came out of it better off than you were when you started while also doing the same for them?

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