STEP 5

Write your negotiation guide.

You have defined the target, the forces in play (SWOT), besides you have been working with yourself to be motivated, now it is the time to fullfill the following table and start your negotiation.

You must organize all the key points of your nego regarding the following three points (in the table there are some examples to fullfill it properly):

• Things you are willing to give: from the point of view of tactics, the fact that you resist, then concede, will give rise to the feeling of having gained something.  On the other side, but, more importantly, it will enable you to examine your opponent's arguments.  The more your opponent fights to get something, the more he will feeling exhausted upon his arguments and his energy.  Besides, remember the things you had given in order to ask for compensation to achieve your targets, your agreements (dashed arrow).

• Things you are going to negotiate: this exchange zone could appear as a real negotiation if the two parties knew the other's plans.  If not try to guess the position of your opponent in order to reach your agreements.

• Things you will never give or you are not prepared to yield.  Sometimes the suppliers are asking for things that you can not give, for example a 10% price increase because of market situation: it's time to break off negotiations.  In other situations if you can not change this situation (break off negotiations), it is because it was badly positioned.

Example of the negotiator's planning:

Graphic 1. Negotiator's planning.

In the graphic one you can study a proposal to get a cost reduction with your supplier taking into consideration some elements (regarding quality, delivery,...) that you can give.

For example, if you are ready to negotiate a price of 0,8€/unit, you must be willing to accept a less quality in your product, worst delivery time, an increase of the volume and a reduction in the payment conditions.  Your negotiation has been succesfully with a achievement of 100%.

However this scope is not the real life.  In fact, when you have to negotiate a price with the suppliers, you must be fit with differents departments (quality, financial, logistics) in order to know what you are willing to give to your supplier to get a cost reduction: for example, you have a meeting with inventories control/logistic department and the conclusion after the meeting is that more than 2 days to deliver the products is unacceptable; you must include this information in your negotiator's planning.

You must play with quality, price, delivery, volume and payment conditions in order to get your target taking into consideration what you can give and what you have to negotiated, and never cross the break point line (in red).

What do you thins about this table?

Is it a good tool for improve your negotiations?

In the following step we are going to plan the strategies and measure the quality of your negotiation regarding this table.