Peter Weedfald is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for SHARP Home Appliances and author of Green Reign Leadership.
Negotiating skills power our business and home lives. Those who simply dabble in the art of negotiation on infrequent occasions most likely ride unsaddled and uneasily. Those who are urbane masters of negotiation do so through a varying combination of creativity, relevancy, and capital leverage. They lean forward and are anxious to engage. They are dauntless, fastidious, and kinetically practiced and exercised. They use a combination of highly relevant selling and fact-based levers. They manicure their strategy and pedicure their creative footing to best prepare their most inviting proposition and presentation while simultaneously discussing questionable rhetorical suppositions from the other side of the negotiation table. They use their imagination in the art of asset capitalization to gain negotiation footing. They are masters of selling and craft a winning strategy using superior business judgment, critical thinking, sales comprehension, relevancy, creativity, and personal passion. And they want to win big on both sides of the negotiation table.
Viceroy negotiators know “a sale will be made today. Either I will sell you, or you will sell me.” They persuade, never evade, or invade upon their potential partners’ imagination and market dreams. They instead mollify, massage, and carve out mutual opportunities to establish and express victory for all. These refulgent partnership arbitrators also leverage human capital at the table in congress with asset capital. They know, present and orchestrate potential market success by identifying best-of-breed leadership (human capital) who they charge with orchestrating and implementing the agreed-upon negotiation tactics. They practice negotiating assiduously in their business and home lives to hone and mature their skills and improve upon their negotiation foundation.
They negotiate to their hearts’ content to best negotiate to their potential partners’ hearts’ consent. The goal is to gain consent for a partnership across the big negotiation table.
The heart of any negotiation is at the heart of the participants’ ability to unionize effective selling using creativity, relevance, and knowledge. They work to gain heartfelt and capital-centric consent to close the deal. I offer 10 core principles that expert negotiators utilize, capitalize on, and amplify to ensure the most successful results:
1. Know that clarity is sometimes a casualty. Be very clear and crisp about what you want and why you deserve it as your end result.
2. Listen with squinting ears. Listen carefully across the table because silence is golden. Use silence to your advantage.
3. Be as durable as steel. Always be prepared to walk away from the negotiation table.
4. Remember, no pain, no gain. Amplify the potential client’s business pressures, not your own. Solve their business pressures, and they will, in turn, solve yours.
5. Know that opportunities are seldom labeled. Identify and amplify adjacent opportunities to gain on your core proposition.
6. Use your imagination. Combine the cold steel of the P&L with the ambient energy of the art of the possible as the best path toward gaining agreement.
7. Keep it simple: Complexity is the refuge of the unsure. Utilize economy of language and thought absent of complex propositions. Think “simplicity guaranteed.”
8. Prepare. Always muscle up on preparation to best present and persuade for mutual gain. Negotiations are not a solitary art form, but rather a mutually beneficial covenant.
9. Aggregate to accentuate. Never engage in negotiations unless your creativity, relevancy, and knowledge are united as one.
10. Unleash capacity. Ensure you have a stellar and detailed foundational road map to ensure your success in the market.
During any rough-and-tumble negotiation at the opportunity table, it is fundamental to separate people’s emotions from the partnership opportunity. Separate emotions from the problem or opportunity you’re trying to solve or gain. As we all hone our skills over time, we should follow and mature these 10 core principles and recognize that the heart of any opportunity is through the heart and mind of the apex negotiator, who is a master in negotiating to their heart’s consent.
