When do we negotiate and when we don't?

"Negotiation is where both parties win, but especially me," said one of my dear clients.

As we see in the movie "The Devil's Advocate", negotiation is a fundamental tenet of life. It means we are constantly making decisions, making exchanges. Most often in business we hear the term negotiation. But when do we actually negotiate and when don't we?

Because the word " negotiation " sounds so good, everything was called a negotiation in the public language. So very often we think we are negotiating, but we are not!!!!! If we think of negotiation as assertion of interest, we soon realize that negotiation has other strategies. One of these is: exchanging views.

"I went to my boss with my opinion and came out with his" or "An opinion is like farting. You hold it in for a while, and then if it fails, it causes a big uproar."

The exchange of views is nothing more than persuasion. Today, you can't sell by persuasion. People don't like pushy salespeople.But how do you find the golden middle way? What's wrong with persuasion?

The point of an exchange of views is that someone has had an opinion up to that point and someone else wants to give it up. The main disadvantage of changing opinions, or in other words persuasion, is that by changing someone's opinion, we somewhat suppress that person's opinion and because that person somehow still holds on to it, they have no choice but to prove that giving up their opinion and therefore themselves will not lead to results. Therefore, exchanging opinions/persuasion may work in a certain percentage of cases, but in a very different way than before and in far fewer situations.

The argument against persuasion is a basic hidden human trait that I learned from a dear client and owner of a billion-dollar company who is over 60 years old:

​"All change is a critique of the existing situation."

If you think about it, this is unfortunately true. Because if someone has to change their current prevailing ideas, they tend to see it as criticism, and that's what persuasion is all about. I am not saying that this is true in all cases, but it is becoming more and more common. So what works instead of persuasion?

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Another negotiating strategy could be absolutism. In other words, dictate. I often find that negotiators, business people, encounter this on a daily basis. It is a situation where one of the two negotiators has much greater perceived or real power, which he or she uses to get a better "deal" in a negotiation. As will be discussed later, this can also be the case in a private negotiation. For example, with certain authorities it is not possible to negotiate 'properly'. Using their legal powers, they mostly do not even talk to you, they just tell you their decision, which you are forced to accept. In business, too, we often see this phenomenon, for which there is even a saying: "A big fish eats a small fish."

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There are countless other strategies in the negotiating repertoire, but they all have the same core purpose: to get a better deal. They may involve losing the battle to win the war, and they may involve changing strategy several times in the same negotiation. It is not easy to know which technique to use when. In our training courses, all these techniques are practised so that participants can use them at a skill level in their work. Only then is a return on investment guaranteed!