“Organisations can no longer only rely on their products and services to differentiate themselves”, Tom Beasor, an acclaimed international negotiator told SmartProcurement. “Often, it is the actual level of training of their personnel that makes the deciding difference.”
This applies as much to your hard skills (technical competence) as it
does to your soft skills (the ability to communicate, interact and
productively negotiate with colleagues, peers, service providers and
suppliers). The ‘skill of negotiating’ is a particular ‘acquired’
inter-personal ability that one develops with experience and can be
greatly accelerated by high quality training
programmes.
Over time the procurement and sales professional has build-up a solid toolkit in terms of the negotiation discipline. However, this toolkit can be advanced dramatically by 15 simple, yet highly effective “Rules of Negotiating” which
Tom Beasor has shared with SmartProcurement:
- Don’t ask, don’t get.
- Aim high and be ambitious.
- Prepare your logic…good facts & figures.
- Emotion beats logic…remember Ralph Lauren!
- Use personal influence.
- Create a sense of risk.
- Be prepared…no casual chats.
- Know the other party…don’t negotiate with strangers.
- Know your variables…at least 20.
- Be reluctant to put down markers…the radius of credibility.
- Thank and bank…never refuse an offer…bank it and go for more.
- Flinch…remember the optician.
- Don’t move too quickly…be reluctant.
- Move in decreasing increments…2-4-6-8 is not the pattern.
- Be a nice person…why be an enemy when you can be a friend.
If you have any queries about how to use negotiation effectively in your organisation, or if you would like more information about Tom Beasor and / or his organisation, please contact admin@smartprocurement.co.za.
