Ideal Meeting Location, Evaluate Your Negotiation Style, Establish Your Goals and Objectives

To be a successful negotiator, it is imperative that you do your homework. Fisher and Ury suggest that you spend about half the time you spend negotiating on preparing for the negotiation.

Ideal Meeting Location

Once you have established a relationship with someone or have negotiated with that party before, you may feel comfortable negotiating over the telephone. Otherwise, conducting the meeting in person would be better than over the phone because it will give you the opportunity to observe the other person’s body language and maintain eye contact.

If you decide to meet in person, offer to meet at your office if possible. Not only will you feel more comfortable in your office, but you also will be able to get quicker approval from senior people (if necessary); and it gives you the home advantage. The main advantage of meeting at the other side’s offices is that you can withhold information until you return to your office. Of course, if neither party is willing to agree to meet at either office, you can always meet at a neutral location.

Evaluate Your Negotiation Style

Before you can improve your negotiation style, you should think about evaluating your current style and your personality. Thinking about the last few negotiations you participated in, what tactics do you think were successful? In what areas do you think you could improve? Would you say you used hard or soft bargaining techniques? Did you tend to be direct or indirect in your negotiation dealings? What would you say are your hot buttons? If you think about how you react in different situations and what your turn-ons and turnoffs are, you will be better prepared to handle yourself professionally while maintaining your composure during your next negotiation. And this can be an advantage when dealing with people whose tempers get the best of them.

Establish Your Goals and Objectives

You need to determine your primary goal and objectives—that is, what you want to get out of the negotiation. Your primary goal should be realistic and accessible. Let’s say your main goal is to hire a new office manager. It is unrealistic to assume that you will be able to hire an office manager at $0 per year and no benefits. You should expand your main goal to include other objectives. For example, you would like to hire a new office manager and pay $4,000 per month and 75 percent of health and dental insurance, offer 10 days of vacation and 5 days of sick time for the first year, and match up to 3 percent of salary in the company’s 401(k) plan.