In today’s global and cross-cultural marketplace, influencing skills and negotiation strategies play a critical role in securing successful business deals, ensuring informed decision making and managing interdependent relationships. Although people negotiate all the time in a globally interdependent environment, it is still an invaluable asset understanding the psychology and strategy of effective negotiating.
■Preparation Phase
The pre-negotiation stage starts from the first contact between the two sides whose interest in doing business with each other is shown. From this stage on, both sides begin to understand each other’s needs, declare values and evaluate the benefits of entering the process of this negotiation. This stage is usually more important than the formal negotiations in the international business relationship. Social and informal relationships between negotiators, trust and confidence in each other are of great help. Both sides also start to form their strategy for face-to-face negotiating as well as try to foresee and take precautions against possible events. To be fully prepared before negotiations, negotiators will have to take into consideration the following aspects: the negotiation team, gathering of information, and the negotiation brief.
◆ Choose Your Team
Keep your team as small as possible. There are several reasons to keep your negotiation small. Primarily, communication is a source of strength within any organization. The negotiation team must be able to seek the input of the team quickly, and large groups are difficult to handle. Secondly, the negotiation team must be able to react promptly as counterparts bring new issues to the table. Keeping the negotiation team small makes it possible and convenient to make timely adjustments to the negotiation plan and to disseminate that information quickly.
Remember that not everyone is cut out to be a negotiator when you select team members. Negotiators must possess a wide variety of social, technical, communication skills and ethics.