Power (confidence) is not the only skill you can work on to be successful and effective in negotiations. There are other skills such as Your own verbal behaviors that affect how skilled you are in negotiation.
Do you have a good grasp of which verbal behaviors you use in a negotiation?
There are a number of different behaviors that are interesting to take a closer look at. I will address two here.
How do you persuade someone in a negotiation?
Why are testing understanding & summarizing so powerful in a negotiation?
In a negotiation, you usually come to a situation where you need to persuade your counterpart.
The question then is: How do you persuade your counterparty to enter into a negotiation?
The next time you negotiate, consider the following. It is important to first understand that your own logic is usually not persuasive to your counterpart.
Arguing your position is not an effective way of persuading someone - as your opponent probably has their own arguments supporting something completely different.
However, we see that the behavior of asking questions is used more by successful negotiators than average ones. The goal is to ask questions about your opponent's way of reasoning about their arguments. Questions are a powerful tool , but it's your counterpart's answers that are interesting to listen to.
The aim is to find key words that your opponent uses in his own reasoning - which you can then use to your advantage to punch holes in the opponent's argument. This leads to an effective way of persuading your counterpart.
The solution therefore lies in digging deep into your opponent's reasoning and not in arguing your own logic.
The importance of understanding each other and avoiding ambiguities is crucial in successful negotiations. One of the most important measures of whether a negotiation has been successful is whether what was agreed upon is actually adhered to in the long term by both parties.
During the negotiation itself, it is therefore important that both parties understand each other. That is, there are no ambiguities.
Test understanding & summarizing are therefore two powerful behaviors to use to avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings.
Examples of testing understanding could be - "do you mean that you want a stop time that is 2 hours earlier than now?"
In Huthwaite International studies on Negotiation, we see that if there is less than 10% of test understanding/summarization in a negotiation, the number of ambiguities and misunderstandings between the partners increases dramatically.
Successful negotiators are usually between 15-20%, while the average negotiator is around 8% of their total behaviors.
How many test understanding/summarize do you use in a negotiation?
We also see that successful negotiators use test understanding more aggressively than others.
An example of this could be: "do you really mean that you want to lower the price and at the same time lower the volume commitment"..... instead of saying ..."I will never agree to this," which can risk a deadlock in the discussion.
By using test understanding offensively , the negotiator can insert a hesitation (a wedge) to open up the discussion and create a movement in the conversation, which leads to progress in the negotiation.
There are several other verbal behaviors that are important to master in order to become an even better negotiator.
Understanding one's behaviors and training one's skill are the first steps towards becoming an even more skilled negotiator.
Good luck with the negotiations!
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