From the course: Negotiation Skills

Identify your reasons for avoiding negotiation

From the course: Negotiation Skills

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Identify your reasons for avoiding negotiation

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- I think there are three reasons why we avoid negotiating, and the first is cultural. In countries like the UK and the USA, it's just not done, except in a few permitted areas like secondhand cars and houses. But in most areas of life, it's a bit of a shock if the customer says, "Can you reduce that price at all?" We don't even think of negotiating, and we assume it's rude. But I'm going to show you that it's so easy and so valuable that it's worth overcoming this resistance and that you can negotiate without upsetting the other person. The second reason we avoid it is that it appears to be unstructured. You don't know what the other person will do. There don't seem to be any rules. What if it all goes horribly wrong? What if you end up not getting the thing you wanted to buy or you don't get the deal that you wanted to make? Again, I'm going to show you that there is a process you can follow, and that the process will ensure that you can't fail to get the deal. The third reason is embarrassment, fear of looking cheap or greedy, especially if we have to cave in and say, "Oh, all right then. I'll pay the full price after all." What if they laugh at us? What if they think we're a bad person after we've gone? I think wanting to be liked is the biggest barrier to negotiating, so I'll be looking at this in detail later. But suffice to say, you can negotiate and still be liked. In fact, maybe they'll think worse of you if you don't negotiate. Mm, we'll come back to that a bit later. All of these fears are unfounded. In fact, every reason for not negotiating is false. Every excuse, every story we tell ourselves, things like, "I don't have enough time" or "I can afford it, so I don't need to negotiate," "It's already reduced," "The salesperson seems like a nice person," they're all false reasons. However nice the salesperson is, do you really want to give them a chunk of your money? Just because you can afford it, do you want to pay more for it than you need to? I mean, you can give money to the other person because you like them, but I would expect that you've got charities or relatives that you'd rather give that money to. And just on the subject of not having time, negotiating is important enough to be worth making the time for and worth overcoming your fears to do. If you get $100 off a sofa and it takes you 10 minutes, that's $600 an hour that you've saved or in a way earned, which seems like a pretty good hourly rate to me. And if you get $1,000 off a car in 10 minutes, that's $6,000 an hour. So even if the process is a bit unpleasant, which doesn't have to be the case, but even if it was, I think it would be worth it for $6,000 an hour, don't you? So what do you think is your biggest barrier to negotiating? What do you tell yourself as an excuse, and what's your real reason for not doing it? And do you think it's a good enough reason to lose you a load of money? And how are you going to overcome it?

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