Tips To Negotiate Effectively

• Ask for more than you expect to get.
• Always pretend to be shocked or surprised at the other side's first proposal.
• Never say yes to first offer.
• Begin with the smallest offer.
• Never make a concession without getting something in return.
• Use the good guy and bad guy technique.
• Never agree to split the difference.

Five Basic Guidelines to Principled Negotiation

1) Separate the people from the problem. The negotiators should attack the problem, not each other.

2) Focus on interests not positions. Your positions are what you want. Your interests are why you want them. Focusing on interests may uncover the existence of mutual or complementary interests that will make agreement possible. One interest that Fisher and Ury suggest is typically important to both negotiators is that of maintaining a good long-term relationship between them. This relationship is of much less concern to those who follow a competitive strategy and is often a casualty of such a strategy.

3) Invent options for mutual gain. Negotiations need not be a competitive game in which each negotiator seeks to gain the biggest slice of a fixed pie. To the contrary, there may be bargaining outcomes that will advance the interests of both negotiators. One well-known example involves the two children who are trying to decide which of them should get the only orange in the house. After some frustrating negotiations, they decide to divide the orange in half. If they had realized that one child wanted to squeeze the orange for its juice, and the other wanted to grate the rind to flavor a cake, an agreement that maximized the interest of each would have become apparent.

4) Insist on using objective criteria. There are some negotiations, or at least some issues, that are not susceptible to a “win-win” approach. The price of something can be such an issue, since each dollar I give you is one dollar less for me. To minimize the risk of either inefficient haggling or a failure to reach agreement on such issues, Fisher and Ury suggest that the parties focus on objective criteria to govern the outcome. Thus, instead of negotiating over the price of a used car, one party might look to the blue book value, the other to the depreciated cost. Even if they cannot agree on which standard should control, focusing on objective criteria may narrow the range of disagreement.

5) Know your best alternative to a negotiated outcome. The reason you negotiate with someone is to produce better results than you could obtain without negotiating with that persons. If you are unaware of what results you could obtain if the negotiations are unsuccessful, you run the risk of entering into an agreement that you would be better off entering into.

What To Consider Before You Enter Any Negotions

Before you enter any negotiation you should have a fairly clear sense of where you stand on the following sorts ofquestions:

• What do you consider to be a good outcome of a negotiation?
• What is success? Is it winning the negotiation?
• If so, what does winning really mean? Does it mean getting as much as you can from the other side and giving as little as possible?
• Or does it depend? And on what does it depend?
• Does winning mean protecting the relationship? That is, you measure success by coming away without hurting the other party's feelings, or by at leastkeeping hurt feelings down to a minimum.
• Does success mean that you have been able to establish a reputation, or that you have been able to maintain one?

Some people believe that success is winning, when winning is clearly understood as more for me and less for you. The pie is only so large and it can be sweetened only so much. But the bigger and the sweeter my slice the better.

That's success!

This seems to be a reasonable enough way to view the world we live in and what negotiation is really all about: There really are resources that are nonrenewable, available in limited supply, and some are scarce. And it is possible that both you and the other side will want those same limited resources. Most conflicts that we deal with every day, however, are not over scarce resources. And if there is no provision for sharing a certain amount of truly scarce resources, we can predict that conflict and most likely violence will ensue.

What you need to be a good negotiator

To be a good negotiater, you need:
· High Observation skills
Able to listen, observe and to note other’s non verbal communications.

· Planning and Organising
What what you expect, your limits and plan the approach towards your outcome.

· Able to move blockages
Able to note and resolve when both parties’ positions are stucked.

· Develop rapport and empathy.
Able to establish and maintain rapport,thus minimize other party’s resistance.

· Flexible attitude
Able to accept others viewpoints& argumenst and open to new possibilities.

· Creativity
Able to think out of the box and try something new to help solve the issue.

What is Negotiation?

There are many definitions of negotiation. One of the simplest is given by Roger Fisher and Bill Ury: "It is a back and forth communication designed to reach an agreement when you and the other side have interests that are shared and others that are opposed."

According to Oxford English Dictionary, Negotiate is to confer another with the view to compromise; to arrange or bring about a desired object; to clear, get over, dispose of an obstacle or difficulty, so Negotiation is the mutual act of coordinating areas of interest.

That means that negotiation is the act of finding a way for all parties to gain something they value from the resolution of a position of conflict. You negotiate when you want to resolve something and both parties have something to gain from the interaction and exchange, you i

Let's start at the centre of every negotiation, at its heart. It is there that we find the crucial element—you! Your approach to negotiation and your success in it, and how you will feel afterwards about what you have achieved are essentials that cannot be overlooked. Every negotiation you are involved in begins with you. Whether you are negotiating something on your own and for yourself, or whether you are a professional negotiator, the whole process starts with you. It is also true that while each of us negotiates all the time, many of us haven't thought much about what it is we do when we negotiate. We get by on a style or approach that we have developed based on our particular experience and many of us just fly by the seat of our pants.

Actually, most negotiators fall into one of two types; those who measure success by winning, and those who measure success by not losing. Negotiators in the first group do everything they can to break the other side's bottom line, to get the last dollar they can extract from the other party.
They believe the other person must move, not them. The second type of negotiator is preoccupied with avoiding losing. They try to resist moving too much or making too many concessions. Success for this type of negotiator means not losing; it means getting out with a deal that is, at the very least, just a little better than one's bottom line.

What are the key elements of negotiation defined in this way?

First, negotiation is not just communication, but rather a specific kind of ommunication.

It is:

• Communication that is explicit.

• Communication that is reciprocal.

• Communication that takes place directly between the parties.

• Communication designed to reach an agreement.

Second, negotiation takes place when:

• Both sides have interests that are shared.

• Both sides have interests that are opposed.

Negotiation thus has cooperation and conflict built right into it. Yet it is neither purely one nor the other. Conflict is the perception of incompatible interests, and negotiation is unique as a means of managing conflict. In negotiation, the tension between the need to assert your own interests and to satisfy the interests of your adversary is always present