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Negotiation Techniques - How to Win by Not Negotiating Against Yourself

Written by: Peter O'Donoghue

Article Overview: If you want to know how to avoid sales and negotiation training then you need this article. If you can conquer just one thing then your negotiation skills will go through the roof.

Negotiation Techniques - How to Win by Not Negotiating Against Yourself

Negotiation and Negotiating Skills are some of the most sought after sales training courses. People seek out negotiation tips, negotiating strategies and scour the web for processes to win against the 'other' person in a negotiation.

It may come as a surprise to you but your own worst enemy in a negotiation is yourself. Some people seem to spend hours seeking out the magic words that will help them win in any negotiation yet fail to look to see what they or their employees are doing wrong.

Two recent personal experiences highlight this fantastically well:

The hunt for my perfect lights:

Imagine how excited I was when I found out that the one of the only 2 sellers of the lights that I wanted for my new office wee about a 10 minutes drive from my home. I rushed down there and recited my list to the chap on the counter -

"I will have 2 of the powered track, 4 of the light fittings, 4 of the special fixings, please"

After a few minutes of scribbling on a piece of paper he quoted me a price which I was expecting (based on the advertised R.R.P. ) but then added:

"But that's before your 25% discount"

Hmmm. Thank You, I thought. That equated to about £100 which I was more than happy to take yet was not expecting.

In this store there is a real need for some retail sales training rather than negotiation training. If this one member of staff was to do this twice per day for 200 working days then he has just instantly lost his company £40,000 in lost profit. That's just from one member of staff in one location.

This chap had just negotiated against himself.

The Perfect Fish and Chips:

One of the great things about living in England is the fantastic fish and chips we have. My local chip shop happens to be very good and as a naughty treat we use them every couple of months. The last time I went there there was a large sign up over the counter which read:

"Due to the rising food prices we have decided to reward our customers by reducing the cost of our chips by 30p." That equates to about a 20% drop in price of one of their one and only products.

Was this a wise marketing move? Absolutely not!

The shop owner had just negotiated against himself. When he is reviewing his profits at the end of the year and is blaming the economic downturn, the credit crunch and everything else going for his terrible year will he be right? Absolutely not!

You don't always need sales or negotiation training if you can take control of your worst negotiating enemy - yourself.

Related Articles
  ESCALATION AS A NEGOTIATION STRATEGY
  15 Techniques for Winning Negotiations
  Eliminate Ranges From Your Negotiating Vocabulary
  Negotiating for the Successful Entrepreneur. How Do You Do It And Still Get What You Want?
  "How To Avoid The most Costly Mistakes Most People Make When Negotiating - Part 2

Article Tags: chap, chip shop, few minutes, fish and chips, food prices, last time, living in england, magic words, negotiating skills, negotiating strategies, negotiation tips, negotiation training, own worst enemy, personal experiences, piece of paper, retail sales, surprise, training courses



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Re: Bad SEO techniques? - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":1jr37kqx]There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash[/quote:1jr37kqx] Hi Jeff, Thanks for adding to the list. I have one question, though. How would one implement Session IDs for a URL, and what benefit would come from doing so?
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":1a8vvwse]There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash[/quote:1a8vvwse] I wouldn't think of "relying on keyword metatags", "using lots of javascript", and "implementing your site in Flash" as bad/black hat...just ineffective. The search engines don't pay much attention to keyword metatags, and using javascript/flash just means the search engines can't "read" it (so if your menu is javascript, for instance, the search engine won't see any keywords you might have in there.)
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - [quote="Alan Mater":3gnk0yja][quote="WebBizIdeas.com":3gnk0yja]There are few more techniques which also known as the Bad SEO Techniques or Black Hat SEO Techniques. Such as: - Relying on keyword metatags - Purchase Links (From Spamming or blacklisted sites or doing purchase links on high level for site marketing) - Horde Page Rank: This is one of my favorites, because it's one that most webmasters don't understand yet. This is because it changed over the past year or two. The concept people have in their mind is that page rank is a key part of site rankings and linking to other sites "leaks page rank" from your site. However, the world has changed. - Swap Links: Another oldie, but not goodie. Search engines want links to represent endorsements. Swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial to detect. Don't swap links for the purpose of building page rank. It's a waste of your time - Implement duplicate content - Use Session IDs on your URLs - Use lots of Javascript - Implement your site in Flash[/quote:3gnk0yja] Hi Jeff, Thanks for adding to the list. I have one question, though. How would one implement Session IDs for a URL, and what benefit would come from doing so?[/quote:3gnk0yja] Session ID shows up in the URL only if the method of the submitted form is GET, i.e., <form method="get"...>. If you can arrange for the form method to be POST, this particular problem does not arise. Data-transmission paths to the host differ between GET and POST. The latter, as well as being somewhat more secure, completely sidesteps the issue of fake URLs and SE confusion.
Re: SEO... - [quote="tumescentliposuction":1wl7yf0v] Getting a high SERP is a combination of a number of things. Leaving out any of the items on the following list of SEO Techniques can result in your page not getting as high a search engine results position as it could.[/quote:1wl7yf0v] Is there a list of SEO techniques that was supposed to follow this post? If so please post it so that we can comment. Cheers Phil


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