Tweet

Impact and Influence in Negotiation – See How They Plan and Organise

Guest post by: Clive Hook

Article Overview: For people to be influenced by you and for you to have personal impact in negotiations, discussions and meetings they need to “buy” what you have to “sell”. This article is about how they organise things and the amount of structure they seem to like. This is of vital importance not only in the meetings and discussions themselves but in any plans for the future – what happens after agreement has been reached and the discussions move to implementation.

Impact and Influence in Negotiation – See How They Plan and Organise

For people to be influenced by you and for you to have personal impact in negotiations, discussions and meetings they need to “buy” what you have to “sell”. In reality this means they are buying you as much as what you have to offer. If they find your way of working uncomfortable, inconvenient or intrusive then they are much less likely to be persuaded by your thinking and suggestions. You want to create confidence and build credibility. Successful influencers and negotiators learn to devote some attention to how the others in the discussions operate so that, when they want to offer something for approval, there is a greater probability of it being accepted.

In previous articles the focus of attention has been on how the others operate in social situations, how they handle information and what criteria they use to decide. This article is about how they organise things and the amount of structure they seem to like. This is of vital importance not only in the meetings and discussions themselves but in any plans for the future – what happens after agreement has been reached and the discussions move to implementation.

If you wait until the end of the discussions to notice how much structure and organisation is preferred it will be too late. You may not even make it to the end of the discussions and the decision point because you will have given the wrong impression, made the wrong impact and not been at all influential.

For some people, time needs to be controlled with clear structures, plans and methods which tell them where they are against clear goals, objectives and outcomes. For others time is not unimportant, it is a force in play but they are less interested in mapping out the future and prefer to let things evolve and take advantage of the options available or those which might emerge.

Uncertainty spells danger to some and opportunity to others and this shows in the way that they like to organise and structure events such as meetings, negotiations and discussions as well as how they make action plans and set objectives - or indeed how they don’t do much action planning or objective setting and prefer to let things unfold.

The agenda for the meeting, the clarity of goals, outcomes and objectives will give you important data. Even more telling will be the attitude to the time set aside for the meeting or negotiation and how important the timetable is. Do meetings start and finish on time or is there more of an attitude of “it takes as long as it takes”?

With this in mind you will know how structured you must appear and how much your credibility in their eyes will be affected by your attention to plans and objectives. Being lax about your timing, not really having an agenda and leaving options open spells disaster for you if you are dealing with someone who is only comfortable with a clear schedule and concrete plans.

Related Articles
  Impact and Influence in Action – Where Are They With This Issue?
  Sales Training - Buyer or Seller You Need to Learn to Negotiate
  Impact and Influence: A Key Competency for Top Performers
  "How To Avoid The most Costly Mistakes Most People Make When Negotiating - Part 2
  Negotiation- fundamentals!
  Impact and Influence in Negotiation: Notice Where Their Focus and Energy Is
  ESCALATION AS A NEGOTIATION STRATEGY
  Influencing vs Negotiating
  Negotiation Success Step Two Do Your Homework
  Impact and Influence in Negotiation – Listen to How They Describe Things
  Impact and Influence in Negotiation - There's More Than One Way to Float Your Ideas
  Impact and Influence in Action – There’s More than One Way to Float Your Ideas
  Eliminate Ranges From Your Negotiating Vocabulary
  Impact and Influence in Action – What Might be Possible?
  A Marketing Myth
  The Apprentice - The Fired Duo
  How writing sales prospecting emails and negotiation emails is different
  Negotiation Techniques - How to Win by Not Negotiating Against Yourself
  Strike a Profile for Profit and Dress to Conquer the World Every Day!
  Win/Win Negotiations

Article Tags: influencing skills, influencing skills training, negotiation skills, negotiation skills training



Related Forum Posts
Business Innovation - Hi Simon If you can finish off the Business Plan and think about your strategic direction or how you are going to use your product to convince people it's a great idea, it will set the foundation for your programming project. You see, when you are looking for funding you will need a Business Plan and Strategic Plan that will convince companies to invest into your new idea. Has anyone achieved this idea before using another industry besides health and fitness that you know of? You should also design some mockups as a "preview" for your programming project. This will also help reduce your programming costs as everyone will know exactly what you want if you have detailed mockups already completed including any functionality you require. Starting mockups for websites and software applications on paper is the best way if you're not a guru in graphic editing software.
Re: QUESTION: What was the last book you read? Would you recomme - Right now I'm reading [i:3d7bb3lw]How to Win Friends and Influence People[/i:3d7bb3lw] by Dale Carnegie. I'm not finished yet but I can already say that I highly recommend it!
Favourite Business Books - The November PROFIT magazine looks at the favourite business books of Canada's most successful entrepreneurs. The top 4 are: 1) Good to Great by Jim Collins 2) The E-Myth by Michael Gerber 3) Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne 4) How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Re: NEW VIDEO - How to improve your business plan - Ask Evan - Thanks Evan, great intro into how the VC's see business plan. I will take a look, but hope that this video as number 1 in a series. It is unfortunate that these types of errors, the most basic of errors as you point out here are common to too many business plans, having reviewed a few hundred myself from both a development and funding perspective. As a mentor and workshop facilitator for Business Plan development for a number of start-up IT and multimedia companies, your presentation help support and show how the VC's see and evaluate a plan Shameful, that too many don't take the time to learn how to properly prepare, present and defend their plans. Over the years, I have enjoyed Business Plan competitions, and help re-work some of the winning proposals
Social IMPACT!! Marketing - How it will change your Business - SEO,SEM and more recently SMO have been the catch phrase for those wishing to optimize their sites for the search engines and all will see you gain some level of success, but I am about to introduce you to a new catch phrase SIM or Social Impact Marketing, a system that has been developed at Kooiii tested on Kooiii and proven to be more effective than any of the other 3 systems in use. When we started Kooiii 6 or so weeks ago we were building a site that had nothing as far as SEO,SEM or SMO properties it was lost way back in the depths of most search engines and had an Alexa rating of 3.8 million, it was lucky to get 12 visitors a week and that was mostly my business partner and myself with the odd visitor that somehow found their way to the site by mistake. Our original idea was to build Kooiii as a Search Platform that was capable of spidering some of the most popular social networks, however we realized early on that those coming to Kooiii would also want some form of social interaction with our site if it was going to go anywhere so we implemented a simple to use Micro-Blogging system as the front end of the system we were putting together. Not having money to promote our new baby we had to resort to using all the free avenues we could find in order to attract people to the site, of course this meant utilizing as many of the social networks we belonged to as possible, Not being spammers and not wishing to appear as such we decided that we would simply keep active on the social networks while sharing and posting to our profiles from kooiii, it was at this point we realized we were onto something suddenly within a week we saw our Alexa drop dramatically and our membership start to grow not only on Kooiii but also on the social sites we belonged to, people seemed to be drawn to us like we were magnets and Kooiii went from 4 members (all admins) to over 1500 members quickly. By teaching those that joined Kooiii to also share member posts on the social networks, not only those we were posting but other members posts as well we saw the birth of a completely new way to promote something, see everyone saw the same effects we were seeing not only was Kooiii skyrocketing up Alexa but the members sites and popularity were also soaring and so Social Impact Marketing came into the world of the Internet. So lets re-cap SIM it's a system where members of Kooiii cross promote each others offers using a socially connected Micro-Blogging system creating tremendous buzz about the offers throughout the wider social scene in other words causing Social Impact using Marketing techniques resulting in massive targeted traffic generation to a specific site or page for basically no monitory outlay.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Leading with Discernment

Designing Employee-Enhancing Training Programs

Are You Too Good for Your Job?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.