From the course: Negotiation Skills

Try the vice technique of negotiation

From the course: Negotiation Skills

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Try the vice technique of negotiation

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- A tactic that's easy to use if you're buying is the vice. This is where you say, "Well, you'll have to do better than that," or words to that effect. A variation could be, "It's still too much for me, I'm afraid." Or, "Can you reduce it a little bit more, please?" Like a vice, you can keep turning the screw for as long as you can get away with it, especially if they come down by quite a lot very easily and quickly, then you just have to give it another turn. But be careful. Don't say if you came down a bit I'd buy it because then you'd have to settle at their end of the playing field. You'd have paid a figure at the high end of the scale. Your aim is to get them down as much as possible and then say, "It's still too much. I can only afford X," and put down an opening offer down at your end of the scale, the low end, because then you can move up from there. But what can you do if someone's using the vice on you? They're saying, "You'll have to reduce your price," and you're thinking, but if I do that, they'll just keep asking for more and more. The answer is to say by how much exactly? The keyword is exactly because this forces them to come out with a number. And once they've done that, once they've put an opening offer on the table, you can then say, "Oh no, I can't possibly go down to that. I could only come down to X," or even better, "Oh no, I can't possibly get onto that, but if you gave me why, then I guess I could come down to X." Just putting some numbers to this, which I think will make it clearer. Suppose you're selling a service, say it's to fix someone's computer, and you want $300. And they're saying, "You'll have to do it for less than that. We can't afford that much." It's clear that they're using the vice. And if you say, "Oh okay, how about 250?" They'll just say, "That's still too much." And who knows where the vice will end? So quite a good reply will be to say, "Well, if you gave me cash up front and a recommendation to your group of companies, then I could do it for 285," a small reduction and getting two tradables in exchange. But even better would be to say, what price do you think is reasonable then? To which they will either open or if they're canny, they might say, "Well, a lot less than 300, that's for sure," to which you need to answer, "Well, how much less exactly?" Now they pretty much have to say, "Well, we would expect to pay about 240 for this." And at last, they've opened. It's important to get into open because they might open it, say 280, which would be good and worth knowing. In fact, even their open of 240 could have been worse. So we then continue with, "240," with a flinch, "Oh no, I couldn't possibly do it for that. My materials alone will cost more than that. I could maybe come down to 285 if you prepared the machine for me in advance," or whatever tradables you want. So that's the vice, easy to use, mainly for buying, and how to combat it by asking them to open. Have you used the vice yourself ever? Could you think of situations where you could use it? And can you think of times when it's been used on you and how about trying the how much exactly response the next time you encounter it?

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