How to Win Any Negotiation

Robert Mayer

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781564149206
• eBook ISBN: 9781601638359
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Today's super negotiator has to be a versatile problem solver, seeking hard-bargain results with a soft touch. With punch and panache, Bob Mayer shows you how to make the grade, revealing powerful negotiating tools drawn from a unique blend of sources:

• — Recent advances in psychology, linguistics, trial advocacy, sales, and management communications—the cutting edge of the art of performance.
• — Tips, tricks, and techniques from 200 of the world's masters—the legendary street and bazaar merchants of Bombay, Istanbul, Cairo, and Shanghai.
• — Mayer's own "been there, done that" years as a lawyer representing thousands of clients (from foreign government agencies and mega-corporations to some of the world's best-known actors, authors, and athletes), negotiating deals on everything from amphitheaters to Zero aircraft.

  You'll learn what works—and what doesn't—when you're up against a stone wall…or your ideas are being rejected…or you're confronted with hostility and anger. Included is the highly acclaimed Deal Maker's Playbook, a collection of step-by-step "how-to's" and "what-to's" for 38 common negotiating situations such as:
  

  • — Buying a car
  • — Leasing an apartment
  • — Dealing with the IRS
  • — Interviewing for a Job
  • — Buying a franchise
  • — Getting out of debt

  It's all here—the fancy footwork and magic moves for outgunning, outmaneuvering, and out-negotiating the other person. And the techniques for developing life skills that will dramatically enhance your chances of professional success and personal satisfaction.

PART I

Soft Touch
Finessing, Influencing, and Persuading Others

CHAPTER 1

Winning Is a Mindset
The Great Wallenda Effect

Being at the top of your game begins with seeding your psyche.

Being a winner is not what you do but what you are. By being, you will become.

A loser will dwell on failure. A winner will visualize attainment. By internalizing success, you develop a winning mindset. With a winning mindset, you will act and react with a winning reflex.

A winner knows that having a victim’s mentality is self-defeating behavior. It will portend rejection or victimization. The self-assured person expects to succeed—and does.

Sound trite? No question about it. Nor is there any question that winning is a head game. For superior results, you have to expect and get the best from yourself.

Karl Wallenda, the greatest of the Great Wallendas, was the finest high-wire aerialist of all time. Failure was beyond Karl Wallenda’s contemplation. He spoke of failure for the first time only weeks before plummeting to his death from a slender cable suspended between two resort hotels. The dramatic correlation between one’s confidence and one’s performance is now referred to by psychologists as the “Wallenda effect.”

There are people who can instruct you how to build your body, train a dog, or close more deals. They can give you pointers on how to be more effective in what you do. But to be a winner you have to think and believe that you are a winner, and what goes on in your head is a do-it-yourself project.

Winning begins with your inner self.

Meet LANCER

The secrets of how to influence others—the persuasion progression—are contained in the acronym L-A-N-C-E-R.

Linkage

Alignment

Needs

Control

Evaluation

Reading

CHAPTER 2

Linkage
The Stealth Factor

LANCER

Shaping tone and mood, personalizing, establishing rapport, developing a positive aura, and creating involvement—all of these create linkage: a critical personal interfacing that makes it possible for you to lead and persuade.

To have the style of a super negotiator, there are six secrets you absolutely must know about.

1. Engage in Cerebral Foreplay

In years past, I looked to the Far East. Principles that Lao-tse preached to his followers in China’s Valley of the Han 300 years before the birth of Christ were used to explain the concept of linkage. Fortune-cookie wisdom reinforced this theme: “A man whose face is without a smile should never open a shop,” and “He who goes softly goes far.”

Taking a more contemporary approach, I now call on the teachings of a modern sage—sex expert Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

Doctor Ruth views the mind as an erogenous zone: “The only real aphrodisiac is the one between your ears.” Great lovers know that how it is done is as important as what is done.

Cerebral foreplay is an integral part of the persuasion process. It is the soft-touch shaping of how the other person feels about you. People will react to the way you act. Good feelings yield good deals. Agreements are made not just on the basis of reason and facts but on whether the deal feels right.

Negotiate Friendly. Your approach should be first as a person, then as a negotiator. View the other person as a challenge, an opponent, rather than an adversarial enemy.

As our fax/e-mail/cellular telephone world becomes more uniformly hightech, a soft touch will make the competitive difference. Treating the other side to a $12 lunch today may be a more persuasive tactic than making a $12,000 concession tomorrow.

Here’s an example from a moment of business crisis and tragedy.

It was the tender side of the “Delta Plan.” “A state-of-the-art blueprint…to follow in the aftermath of a disaster,” reported the Wall Street Journal.

“Within hours of a Texas jet crash in which 137 people died, Delta had dispatched employees to be with every victim’s family.” Delta’s strategy was to treat “the victims and their families with all the compassion a corporation can muster.”

The result?

“Later, many victims found it difficult to sue a friend. This early bonding…was part of Delta’s claims-control strategy. And it has been extraordinarily effective.”

2. Hit the Ground Walking

Underwhelm Your Opponent. More often than not, you will want to demonstrate that a low-key style is the order of the day. Relaxed people will be less resistant to you and your ideas.

Practice tip: People who are sitting down are more easily persuaded than people who are standing up.

Lighten Up. The people you want to influence will be defensive or receptive, depending on how they read you. Schmooze for a while about the weather, the traffic, Sunday’s ball game, the trivia question you missed last night, some mutual acquaintance. Accept or offer a cup of coffee. Tell a joke. Icebreakers shape a persuasive climate.

3. Personalize the Process

Have you noticed that negotiations conducted over a shorter period of time are always more competitive? They are. The reason? The negotiators are less able to humanize the other side through personalization techniques.

Personalizing means speaking for yourself rather than your company. Which is more persuasive? “Karen, I would like to tell you about a deal I can make for you,” or “Acme has a proposal that it would like to make to Apex.”

Professional communicators personalize constantly. Television news team members call each other by their first names more than we mere mortals do. Their highly personalized dialogue—“Fine reporting, Mary Ann.” “What has happened in sports today, Ted?” “Is it going to rain tomorrow, Pete?”—gives viewers a sense of ease and commitment. All news shows are pretty much the same in format and content. We tend to choose our team by how we feel about its players.

The personalizing strategy works in reverse, too. T. Reynolds, an IRS agent, had maneuvered one of my clients into a full-court press. Our conversations had always been cordial, but with a standoffish “Mr. Mayer”/“Mr. Reynolds” sort of way. When I finally had occasion to send him a letter of agreement, I asked his first name. “Just address the letter to T. Reynolds,” he replied, Internal Revenue agents use only a first-name initial on business cards and correspondence. When they speak, it is for “the Department” or “the Service” rather than for themselves. Similarly, in most jurisdictions, police officers do not have their first names on their ID tags.

Their strategy is depersonalization. The more detached the officers or agents, the less likely they are to be guided by their emotions and the more likely they are to do their job “by the book.”

4. Establish Rapport

Trust and credibility are essential ingredients of the persuasion progression. Without these ingredients, negotiating would be nothing more than discussion, because commitment would always be in doubt. No wonder it is common to hear businesspeople talk of needing a high comfort level with the folks on the other side.

Trust and credibility are established through reputation and expertise, but most often through rapport. The other person is more likely to be persuaded if he or she likes you.

People will like you if you are sincerely interested in them and their problems. The fellow with problems at the office will give those problems a higher priority than a famine in Somalia, a volcanic eruption in Colombia, or an earthquake in Japan. Why? Because those problems at the office are his problems.

Give other people a sense of genuine self-importance and they cannot help but like you. Talk to people about themselves and what they are interested in and they will listen for hours, and you will be liked for having picked such interesting subject matter.

Don’t overdo. Putting on your negotiating personality doesn’t mean making the other person your new best friend. It means not allowing that person to be a stranger.

Never, never be a “junk bonding” phony.

Tactical rapport is understanding that your problems and needs are usually both boring and of little consequence to the other person, their own problems and needs, however, are of paramount importance. As Mel Brooks puts it, “Tragedy is if I get a hangnail. Comedy is if you slip on a banana peel and die.”

Sorry. When it comes to establishing rapport, only your mother really cares about how wonderful your new minivan is—or how much you enjoyed the authentic luau you went to in Kona—or how exhausted you are from all those holiday parties.

5. Create a Positive Aura

Persuasion is a function of attitude. Positive attitudes produce positive results; negative attitudes produce hostility.

A positive attitude will be reflected in your approach. Your voice, demeanor, and attentiveness should communicate concern, empathy, understanding, and a desire to work side-by-side rather than toe-to-toe.

Before you can control a situation, you have to be able to control yourself. Sure, it’s tough to be positive when your opponent is a sour, cantankerous deal-crippler. Sure, it would be self-satisfying to tell an irascible and abusive ass to take his proposal and shove it up his briefcase. But is losing the deal a luxury you can afford? Is being negative going to maximize your chance of success?

In personal relationships, occasional outbursts of aggression or an unkind word will penalize you a few strokes. They are not terminal. The relationship can be patched up at another time and the game resumed.

In a business relationship, the penalty is the game. You do not have the luxury of being able to react rather than act.

Be true to your commitments. Pay attention to the little things; through them, other people read you. If you are not punctual in keeping appointments, are remiss about returning phone calls, or don’t send the letter you promised would be in tonight’s mail, you are transmitting a negative message that you cannot be relied on to carry out your end of a bargain.

6. Create Involvement

A Shirt Story. Macy’s is Macy’s. Neiman Marcus is something altogether different. Macy’s hangs most of its sport shirts on racks. Neiman Marcus, true to its upscale image, displays its shirts in fingerprint-free glass showcases.

I confess. On a number of occasions I have purchased a Neiman Marcus shirt even though I knew it really wasn’t right for me. I did so because I was either too embarrassed or too cowardly to let down the saleslady who was so nice about refolding and repinning the five other shirts that didn’t fit. I knew she was being paid for her exemplary effort but somehow, because of her involvement, I felt compelled to buy at least one shirt even though it wasn’t a GQ perfect fit. To buy nothing would have been a rejection of a very nice person rather than a rejection of Neiman Marcus inventory.

A Shaggy Dog Story. We wanted to buy a family dog. The cheapest part of owning a dog is the purchase price. I decided that if I was going to go through weeks of training and years of expense, I might as well get a best friend with some status. And so I was off to buy a soft-coated wheaten terrier.

I telephoned the local wheaten guru and was told that, “if approved,” I would be number 33 on an “adoption” list that several Los Angeles breeders drew from as litters were born. I could expect a call in about seven months.

“Seven months!!”

Being status dogs, wheatens are not available for viewing in mall pet shops, which are reserved for spaniels, collies, labs, poodles, and other species of lesser status. So, a week later, I again telephoned the guru and explained that my kids had never seen a wheaten. Could I show them her dogs so that they could share my anticipation and excitement?

On Sunday afternoon, the family descended on her. We admired her house. We admired her kids. Most of all, we admired her dogs. I had a bouquet of flowers delivered afterward to thank her for being so kind.

A week later I got the call: A wheaten puppy was available.

Time flies but it isn’t supercharged. Congratulations were in order! I was now number one!

Why?

Because I was no lon...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction: So You Want to Tilt the Playing Field
• PART I Soft Touch: Finessing, Influencing, and Persuading Others
• PART II Trouble Shooting: Settling for More
• PART III Hard Bargain: Winning When the Score Is Kept in Dollars
• PART IV The Deal-Maker’s Playbook: Low-Impact, High-Yield Tips, Tricks, and Tactics
• Coming Full Circle
• Index
• About the Author