In an earlier post I mentioned that I would share some of the techniques I use in successful negotiations. Here is my attempt.

A negotiation is a process that takes place between two or more parties to reach an agreement on a specific matter.
The goal of negotiating is to get the best result for you. There are two ways to achieve the best result: distributive negotiations and integrative negotiations. However, only one of these techniques will get the best result for everyone involved in the negotiations.
Think of distributive and integrative negotiations like this:
Distributive – You have a blueberry pie and you are splitting it between you and your friend. You each negotiate about how many slices of the pie each of you will get. Essentially, if you get more, your friend get’s less and vice versa.
Integrative – You have a blueberry pie and you are splitting it between you and your friend only you bake a bigger pie so you both can have as much as you want. Basically, you both thought outside of the box and maximized the value for both of you and everyone is happy. This is the best type of negotiation and the way you want to approach all negotiations.
Now that we know what integrative negotiations are, we can get into how to use them. The key to integrative negotiations is trading our preferences and thinking of other issues that will influence the outcome of the negotiation. In every negotiation, each party has their own priorities and preferences. Let’s use an example.

Suppose you are looking to rent an apartment from a landlord and you are trying to get a lower price. He prefers that you move in at the beginning of June as opposed to July and you have no preference on that issue. This is worth something to you! You could trade his preference for you moving in June for a discount on the monthly rent (which is your preference).

Of course, how could you have possibly have known this if you did not talk to the landlord and ask? The key to successful negotiations is to get as much information as possible from the other party. The more information you get, the more you can trade with them (and also the more power you have; more on this in a later post).

Perhaps you find out from the landlord that he has been getting really into tennis lately. It turns out that you are a really good tennis player. You could offer to give him tennis lessons once a month to lower the monthly price. This costs you nothing and the landlord has something to gain as well.

There are so many issues that can be packaged into a negotiation. You would never know about all these issues if you did not talk to the other party and look for these. Just a casual conversation could increase the value of the negotiation for both parties. Here is another example:

I once heard of story where one guy was negotiating his compensation and benefits for his job. He was an avid paraglider. Apparently, paragliding is best when the winds are coming from the right direction and are strong enough. So, his negotiation with the company was that whenever the wind was coming from the east and above a certain number of miles per hour, he would get the day off to go paragliding.

Clearly he had a lot to offer the company for them to accept that. Maybe he traded a lower salary for that benefit. That is a more extreme example of different issues that you can negotiate, but hopefully you get the idea.
This leads into how to prepare for the negotiation. You always want to go into a negotiation knowing what your preferences are and what is more important to you. It helps to make a list of things that you want in the order of your preferences. Your goal during the course of the negotiation is to find out the preferences of the other party and to match those up with the issues that you don’t care as much about and make those smaller concessions in order to get your preferences.
There will be more to come on preparing for a negotiation in a later post. Did this post help you? Do you have anything to add? If so, please comment below.