By now, you should be pretty familiar with how to negotiate effectively. You’ve learned how to use tactics like mirroring, summarizing, labeling, accusation audits, and active listening to get your negotiating counterpart feeling safe and comfortable. By doing this, you’ve gotten them to reveal the key information that will give you the decisive upper hand.
Let’s quickly review how to put all of these ideas into practice. By mastering the techniques we’ve learned, you’ll have the skills and confidence to get what you want out of any negotiation.
Identify a best-case goal and a worst-case scenario. This sets your limits and gives you a range.
Be open-minded. Remember, you don’t have all the information yet. Black Swans are still out there. You might be able to do even better than your best-case scenario.
Don’t negotiate against yourself by settling in the middle: shoot for your best-case scenario. This is a good way of using your own loss-aversion instinct to your advantage: you’ll feel like you “lost” if you didn’t achieve your best-case. This means you’ll work that much harder to avoid anything less than your optimal outcome.
Before you go in, make a list of the known facts that have led to the negotiation. This gives you the lay of the land and minimizes the chances of a surprise.
Figure out what you want, what your counterpart wants, and any sources of trouble that might stop you from making a deal.
Anticipate how your counterpart feels about the facts you’ve summarized. Use this to form your accusation audit: list every possible accusation you think they could make against you.
Then, turn those accusations into labels that identify their feelings, like “It seems like you value X,” or “It seems like you’re hesitant to commit to X.”
Figure out what the other party is worried about. Uncover their worldview and blinders that might prevent them from seeing things the way you want them to see things.
Importantly, ask questions that force your counterpart to think about how to solve your problems. Questions like, “What’s the core issue?” “What are we trying to accomplish?” and “How can I meet the conditions you’re asking for?” are all great ways of turning the table. They function both as a “no” without actually saying it, and they force your counterpart to come up with solutions that will help you.
Your counterpart will be more inclined to implement the solution, because it’s something they arrived at themselves through your calibrated questions. You should have 3-5 calibrated questions ready to go at the outset.
Ask questions like, “How does this affect the rest of your team” to identify deal-killers and deal-makers who aren’t in the room. Remember, you need to figure out how the decision actually gets made on the other side. If your counterpart isn’t the person who can really pull the trigger, you need to know that, because it will change how you negotiate with them. Once you know that decisions are being made by committee, you need to recalibrate your questions to figure out what that committee really wants.
This will help you avoid implementation problems. Your counterpart may not be able to pull it off, even if they agree with you in principle.
What non-monetary things does your counterpart have that you’d want? These are often things that they don’t value or care about, but are highly valuable to you. Ask yourself what your counterpart could give you that would get you to agree to the deal for free.