FAQs on Negotiation: Picking the Brain of a Professional Negotiator

Q uestion: Bob, you work with businesspeople all over the world. What's the most common flaw you see in negotiators on a day-to-day basis?

Answer: It's two-fold actually: not preparing properly, and failing to think creatively in negotiating situations.

To increase your chances of achieving the most favorable outcome, it's imperative that you plan ahead to negotiate. Most people simply don't plan. They don't do their homework, and what they do isn't very creative.

Businesspeople typically do a good job with the nuts and bolts, such as prices and quantities. However, the most successful negotiators go far beyond that. They focus on creativity and problem-solving rather than just number-crunching.

Most people are so absorbed by preventing what could go wrong and protecting against risk, they don't explore the creative side of deal-making. A phrase we often hear from clients is, "I hadn't thought of it that way." This part - the planning and creative side of the negotiation process - is what separates the amateurs from the pros.

Q. What keeps most salespeople from being good negotiators?

A. Most of us would agree that that the main attribute of many salespeople is their ability to build relationships. Here's the irony of that statement: It's their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

Many salespeople suffer from what I call a "subservient mentality." They view the person with whom they're negotiating as having all the power - the power to say yes and the power to say no. They think they need the deal to go through more than the other party needs their product, service or idea.

This mentality lends itself to situations in which a person will do whatever it takes to satisfy the other party's needs or extend goodwill. I call salespeople who carry this trait to the extreme "pleasers."

Pleasers are especially adept at preserving harmony and avoiding disruption in business situations. The drawback, however, is that they can allow themselves to be abused. It's hard for classic pleasers to exert themselves in head-to-head negotiating situations, and, as a result, they often are guilty of leaving company profits "on the table."

Every sales force has a number of Joe Pleasers. Joe has been with the company for several years and has a solid client base. His customers love him because he's great at solving problems and cultivating relationships. His repeat business is good, but when his accounts are analyzed, the profit margin is below where it should be.

In closing situations, Joe gives up more than he needs to. The problem is compounded by the fact that he often is doing business with decision-makers who are tough negotiators. Q. Bob, you work a lot with people in the technical professions. You even offer a course named, "STREET-SMART Negotiating for the Technical Professional." Do technical professionals have a different situation when it comes to negotiation?

A. They really do - for several reasons. Technical professionals, by their very nature, are very left brain oriented. That's why they went into the technical professions. They begin very left-brained, very technical in nature, and when they enter school ... it gets worse!

The curriculum is geared for the scientific/technical mind. The professors are often very technical in nature. What began as a tendency can become an obsession.

A result is that students often are looking for "the answer," as in "the perfect answer" or the "right answer." We've all walked into the office of a technical professional and found bookshelves filled with manuals - with rules.

This mindset can be comforting when you're looking for a mechanic to determine the cause of an unusual sound under the hood of your luxury sports car, but it doesn't lead to much creativity in business situations.

There's more. A large part of negotiating well is the right-brain-based activity of seemingly reading another's thoughts - the ability to determine what another person is thinking, how they might respond in certain situations, where their "buttons" reside in business situations.

Good negotiators intuitively know what needs to take place to evoke a certain response and certain reactions.

All of this is extreme right-brain activity. It's been my experience that most technical professionals are not adept at picking up on those signals.

Lastly, it could be said the business world plays a trick on technical professionals.

Q. How so?

A. At the outset of their careers, technical professionals are led to believe that their career path and success will depend strictly on their intelligence, their brightness, and their ability to perform tasks efficiently and flawlessly.

At some point in the career path of a technical professional, the rules change. It's no longer enough to just be good - really good - at what you do. They're expected to have judgment and people skills and influencing ability and problem-solving expertise in the people arena.

Many technical professionals believe the rules have changed - that business and life have played a trick on them.

The skills that brought them success early in their career no longer work. They need the skills that they have often disregarded as "fluff" or "soft."

So, yes, technical professionals do have a unique situation in that they often have to make a shift in mindset and skill set to progress on the corporate ladder.