Negotiating Tactics: A Key Point Summary

Use Time To Your Benefit
Set time deadlines – 80% of concessions come in the last 20% of the time.

1. Take Time Outs
   Take adjournments – to talk to your people – defuse the tensions and find out from the people who are not emotionally involved, how they see the situation.
2. Use The Power Of Silence
   The benefits of using the power of silence must not be underestimated. Ask pre-planned questions and hold the silence. This is even more difficult on the telephone so discipline yourself to do so.
3. Act Smart, But Not Too Clever
   Acting too smart and sophisticated breeds competition in a negotiation. People will tell you more if you ask the basic questions even when you think you know the answers. This will let you hear the answers from the "horse’s mouth".
4. Set Aside Issues That Cannot Instantly Be Resolved
   Move on to ones that can be agreed immediately. Take the difficult issues to one side, isolate them, and agree with the other party to come back to them later. This has the effect of agreeing most of the points and helps the other party come towards an agreement on the outstanding points. They will have invested a great deal of time. Why jeopardise the deal now.
5. Have Higher Authority In Your Armoury
   Average negotiators believe that it is a weakness to have to refer to a higher authority. Experienced negotiators know that having the ability to refer things upward can be enormously powerful. It also gives you some thinking time. Note: make sure you refer to a group of people not an individual.
6. Never React, That Way You Can Never Overreact
   Act in anger rather than react in anger. After President Krushev of the USSR had banged the table with his shoe at the United Nations in 1976 during a particularly tense part of the debate, the observers were amazed to find, on the video playback that he was still wearing two shoes. He and his team had deliberately bought a shoe for "table banging"

Handle Threats In An Uncompromising Way

Recognise it as a threat to weaken your position and your resolve. Hold a silence. People when they have made a threat expect you to react and the mere fact that you don’t do so – often means that they than have to qualify what they have said. Many people find this silence vary uncomfortable – so make some notes on your pad and then look up and say "that’s interesting – why did you say that?" Or something similar. If necessary take a break, time out or an adjournment as these have the same effect of cooling things down and gives some quality time with your team to rationally discuss how to progress the negotiation.