One of the first steps to becoming a master negotiator is to learn 5 key negotiation behaviors and how they work within the 3D Negotiation Model to your benefit.
The Negotiation Model hypothesizes that there are three individual negotiation dimensions that play off each other to ensure an end result with the best possible results for yourself and the company you’re representing.
RED BEAR's negotiation model triangle contains the Collaborative, Competitive, and Creative Dimensions. Unlike the Bermuda Triangle, exploring the Negotiation Triangle is where you can find great treasures.
The Competitive Dimension focuses on your self-interest and that of the party you are representing. This dimension often focuses on a single or small set of concrete negotiables, like money or payment terms. At its extreme, the Competitive Dimension leads to a zero-sum “win-lose” mentality, where every win you get comes at the cost of the other party, which isn’t ideal to build long-term relationships.
The Collaborative Dimension focuses on facilitating communication in order to build a productive long-term relationship. Through collaboration and by searching for multiple negotiables, negotiators are able to open the playing field and build rapport. The Collaborative Dimension seeks mutually satisfactory outcomes for all parties in the negotiation. At its negative extremes, collaboration might end up sacrificing otherwise achievable wins for the sake of appeasing all parties and getting the deal.
The Collaborative and Competitive dimensions act as healthy antagonists to each other and create a productive tension that leads to the third dimension, the Creative dimension. You’ve likely experienced this tension before – it often feels like an uneasy knot in your stomach whenever the opposing party puts their foot down, makes a hard counter, or otherwise signals an impasse. Expert negotiators are able to take this tension and transform it into the momentum that leads to a successful deal.
The Creative Dimension focuses on breaking through deadlock and trying to discover even better solutions that would otherwise be left unexplored. Creativity is usually what sets expert and average negotiators apart.
Now, in theory, the Three Dimensions are fairly easy to understand. However, actually executing them properly requires a little extra education and polish. That’s where the Five Negotiation Behaviors come in. These negotiation behaviors align themselves along either the Competitive or Collaborative sides and should be used as the situation calls for it to lead to that Creative Breakthrough that punctuates excellent deals.
The five negotiation behaviors are:
Making demands and making trades are the two competitive negotiation behaviors, and they’re skillful tools to use when your self-interest is threatened.
Making demands is best done with simple declarative sentences starting with “I” and setting a time limit, positioning your self-interest, and maintaining control. For example, “I need you to guarantee two-day delivery effective immediately before we can get the contract to legal.”
The most effective demands are:
Demands should be used when you need to add clarity about what you want, need or expect, need to raise a difficult issue, set a boundary, or simply show conviction.
Demands usually sound like “I want, I don’t want, I expect, I’ve got to have, I would like.” For example:
I don’t want this specific clause in the final contract.
Naturally, only making demands will lead you to an impasse. That’s where making trades comes in. You make trades when you want to break an impasse or gain closure in an element of the negotiation and move it forward. For example, “We’ll guarantee two-day delivery if you commit to $100,000 a month in minimum orders.”
The most effective ways to make trades is to ensure your requests are:
Trades are direct ways of saying “I’ll do X if you do Y.” For example,
The Relationship negotiation behaviors seek to fortify a long-term relationship while simultaneously guiding the negotiation towards a favorable deal for the parties involved. These negotiation behaviors seek to build rapport and get everyone on the same page.
Asking open questions tends to get the other party to open up more and share information that could prove to be valuable if the time to find creative solutions comes. These questions aim to elicit real information, and not just simple binary “yes” or “no” responses. A good open-ended question not only finds good intel but it also uncovers the underlying motivation and true needs of the other party. For example, “Just so I get an idea, is there a reason fast shipping is a priority for you?”
Good Open Questions are:
Open Questions sound like:
Testing and summarizing helps clarify your understanding and confirm areas of agreement and disagreement with the other party. For example, “Let me make sure I understand correctly, if we spend more than $100,000 per month with you guys, we’ll receive two-day shipping at no additional cost on all orders?”
Testing and Summarizing is critical because it not only helps create touch points for the discussion, but it forces you to listen carefully, which showcases your interest to the other party.
Testing and Summarizing sound like:
For example:
The final relationship behavior is proposing conditionally. This behavior is used to break icy stagnation, get the creative brain juice flowing, and help reveal creative solutions from a different angle. A conditional proposal is generally phrased as a hypothetical question with the goal of inciting thought and dialogue. For example, “What if we only order $50,000 of goods per month but still need the two-day shipping?”
Proposing Conditionally helps you to stay in the tension and see if you can come up with creative ideas.
Proposing Conditionally sounds like:
• What if we could find a way to ____? Would that be of value to you?
For example:
When both the competitive and collaborative dimensions work together, a healthy tension emerges between the self-interests of the parties and the desire of both to maintain their relationship. This way, the chances of a truly creative and unanticipated approach to a mutually profitable settlement increase dramatically.
By developing a high proficiency to use these 5 negotiation behaviors in their appropriate situations, you’ll be able to transcend into the upper echelon of negotiation. These negotiation behaviors will require some on-the-ground experience to really get a feeling for their utility in a live negotiation, so be sure to practice.