Danny Ertel is a prize-winning author on negotiation and partnering and the founding partner of Vantage Partners.
OK, there is probably more than one important thing about improving negotiators’ skills. But I have a favorite, which has to do with the challenge of getting experienced, accomplished professionals to change how they do things.
Whether you are training sales reps in how to negotiate better so they close more deals without eroding average sales price; or training category managers and buyers so they reduce total cost of ownership while also remaining a preferred customer of their critical suppliers; or training any number of other roles in the organization to negotiate more effectively with partners, regulators, licensees and more, the challenge remains the same: Many of the people in your company who have been given responsibility for significant deals already have a way they negotiate, and that makes it hard to get them to do it differently. Just teaching them new techniques is unlikely to get the results you need.
Assumptions lead to actions, which produce results.
If you want better outcomes from negotiations, you have to work backwards to the actions the negotiators take, and change those. But to change what negotiators do, you can’t just tell them to negotiate differently “because they’ve been doing it wrong.” You first have to influence how they think about how to negotiate. You want them to question their assumptions about the choices they face in a negotiation.
In my three decades of experience advising and training negotiators across industries and deal types, I have found that if you don’t get experienced professionals to question the assumptions that underlie their choices, they won’t choose different strategies or different tactics in any reliable or consistent way.
But getting them to do that is tricky: It’s not about proving them wrong. Training an already experienced negotiator is about helping them get comfortable with adding to their repertoire.
One of the best ways to have participants in a training session reflect on their choices is to give them room to act on their default assumptions. For example, we’ll run an exercise and tell them their objective is “to do as well as you can for yourself.” Many people assume that means it is a zero-sum game, and they have to beat their counterparts. But when they act on the basis of that assumption, they often find that while they may have come out ahead of their counterpart, they fared poorly in comparison to other pairs who made different assumptions.
The point is not just to have them “fail.” What seems to catalyze change is not the experience of having ended up down a less productive path, but the discussion that follows about when they might choose one assumption over another, or how they might test which strategy is more likely to produce better results in any given situation. Instead of having to conclude that they have heretofore “been doing it wrong” (which experienced professionals might well resist), they can shift their frame from “this is how I negotiate” to “I have choices to make, based on a more thorough understanding of what success looks like.”
Changing the frame is also about what managers and leaders do. You can keep your negotiators in the training room as long as you like, but if their manager never subsequently asks them questions about an upcoming negotiation that reflects some of what they learned in a workshop, the negotiators will likely conclude that what happens in the training room stays in the training room.
If you want the lessons to translate from training to real-world application, you need to ensure that someone in their chain of command notices whether they are applying the new tools and concepts and integrating the skills into their day to day. If you are not doing that, you are not really changing how they think about negotiation or influencing the choices they make about strategies to put into action.
Preparation is your best lever.
As you may have seen in prior pieces I’ve written, I believe you negotiate like you prepare. If you have carefully considered your and your counterpart’s interests and come up with some options that seem to meet them, you will use that knowledge as part of your strategy. If you know your BATNA (your best alternative to a negotiated agreement), you won’t settle for less at the table. If you have thought about your counterpart’s need to explain the deal to their stakeholders, you won’t leave that to chance; you’ll provide them with objective standards or comparables that show the deal is a reasonable and fair one.
I remember some years ago working on a project to help a large pharmaceutical company improve their partnership negotiations with smaller biotech firms. They wanted to become a “preferred partner” for drug development deals, by virtue of more than the size of their royalty checks. The COO asked me what was one thing he could do when possible deals came to him for review, to make sure they were executing on their strategy.
I recommended he ask the negotiators how the proposed terms met the small biotech’s top three interests. If they couldn’t answer that question, they were just not aligned on strategy; they might not get the deal done at all, and if they did, it likely was because they were willing to overpay.
That question, of course, was meant not just as a final quality control at the executive level. It was intended to ensure that no one would get to that stage in a partnership negotiation without having had extensive conversations with their counterparts about their interests and ways to meet them. (And indeed, when word got around about his questions, no deal team wanted to be unable to answer.) Improving negotiators’ skills starts in the training room, but changing the negotiator’s mindset takes engagement and follow-through.
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