Hard Negotiations Or Softer Approach - Norm of the Day?

<My sales director always pushes me away when she has to negotiate with the client. Her reason is I am bad at negotiation. Well, negotiating is indeed an art known to women very well :-p >

Jokes apart, now let's further our conversation on customer intelligence and how it impacts sales positively.

Management gurus have rightly said that successful leadership or sales management is all about communicating effectively. For being an effective and influencing salesperson, it is mandatory to ensure responsibility, persuasion, premeditated association, trust, and support to the teams or buyers. What style of communication accommodates these elements the best? Are hard negotiations imperative to convince and influence the prospectives or customers or a softer approach can bring better outcomes?

When it comes to negotiation, most of the sales personnel assume a hard approach to be effective, considering negotiation as a clash of wills

The Art of Negotiation & Its Various Shades

Hard negotiation and communication style solely focuses on results. Bargaining in the market is the conventional image of hard negotiation or bargaining.

Soft approach emphasises preserving the association ahead of outcomes

While both soft and hard negotiation styles revolve around positions, the soft approach is different from a hard negotiation approach in several ways. The duo in O. Henry’s "Gift of the Magi" are typical softies, sacrificing to accommodate each other.

The Effects of the Negotiation Process

The negotiation process has a high tendency to influence the behaviour after negotiation.

When people negotiate, they have few compatible interests, which are similar, consistent. And they have, at the same time, the interests are contrary to each other. As people negotiate, they try to determine a common ground as well as a way to bridge their differences.

If you take into consideration mainstream negotiation books available in the market, they are mainly focused on the idea of “Getting More.” So much of the typical negotiation fiction and the zeitgeist is about being firmer, tougher and “getting to yes.”

If you concede slowly and begin with a high anchor, use forceful tactics, show some anger, you would probably end up attaining favourable negotiated terms. But what is more important and effective finding is that sometimes by being more forceful, by being more antagonistic, you might achieve a better-negotiated result, but eventually, through such process, produce conflict that brings you a worse value overall.

Negotiations – Towards the Soft Approach

The first thing is to think if the negotiation process is highlighting the conflict or building a rapport.

That is, it could be that via negotiation process we identify fundamental common interests. We determine the ways for both sides to do better. We end up developing collaboration maybe because we end up with small talk or discussing each other to dinner or going to a noble event via negotiation process. What's significant is that we recognise that developing a rapport helps with the negotiation. It is equally significant for post-agreement behaviour, and to recognise that the relationship doesn’t finish when we’ve just touched the agreement.

Concluding Thoughts

The broader implication that we need to be mindful of the types of relationships that we cultivate regularly. At the core negotiations, there’s the notion that we all have some contradictory interests and some similar interests. One of the key thoughts that we need to remember how we can manage this interaction with others that we don’t highlight the conflict and leave the counterpart feeling like their interests primarily conflict with ours. This is something a softer approach to negotiation seems to accommodate.