Becoming an expert negotiator – lessons from the pros

If you ask most agency leaders, very few will claim to enjoy negotiating. Sure, it’s a necessary part of business, but secretly most of them will be wondering how they could do things better. Could they have got negotiated better payment terms; could they have secured a larger remit with a client; could they have hired that senior person for less?

Plus, negotiating can be filled with emotion, and dealing with emotion in the workplace can be deeply uncomfortable.

This lively and at times, humorous episode of Waypointers features not one, but two experts discussing ways of improving negotiation skills, with scenarios lifted from their working lives. They clearly lived to tell the tale, but there were some potentially career ending moments along the way!

In the negotiation hotseat are Waypoint’s Jim Houghton, the author of a recent book, The Work Smarter Guide to Negotiation, co-written with Kirk Kinnell, a hostage negotiator and counter-terrorism expert, and chief negotiation officer Sam Macbeth, with many years’ experience helping business leaders and agency heads smarten up their negotiation tactics.  Picking their brains and asking the difficult questions is Waypoint partner, Phil Gripton.

Looking at negotiation in a new way

There’s plenty of cliches and combative language around negotiation to navigate. Winners and losers, point-scoring, one-upmanship, the list goes on. However, if you’re going to have a working relationship in the future, both parties need to feel that they’ve gained something.

You also need to have a tried and tested negotiation process, in the same way that you would for other business activities such as new business. In their experience, too few agencies have realised this and instead muddle their way through, hoping for the best.

Jim and Sam also reveal that you should try a range of other tactics, such as persuasion, before getting into any negotiation scenario.

For more advice on how to plan for and behave in a broad range of negotiations, listen to this lively and practical episode of Waypointers by selecting the link.