WIN/WIN or WIN/LOSE: IT’S UP TO YOU

In any negotiation or mediation, your tactics and strategies will dictate success or failure. Here’s why.

1)Planning and preparation are essential. No matter what business you operate, no one is an island. So whether you’re buying or selling goods or services you need to deal with others.

2) While driving a hard bargain may be a legitimate part of the process, it must be based upon your business’ relative strengths as compared with the other party’s. Bluster is never a substitute for facts and reason.

3) Every party in negotiation or mediation wants to emerge a ‘winner’. So it’s always important to establish a  correlation between strategy and underlying financial strength. The other party must do the same.

4) Making unreasonable offers or demands tends to backfire if the other party has better alternatives and doesn’t need to deal with you. It’s up to the other party to to disclose those alternatives or merely stay silent and walk away.

5) Always remember that a good deal by definition must meet as many of both parties’ interests as reasonably possible. And what is reasonable depends on relative strength or weakness. Otherwise, an overly rich deal for one party means an overly poor deal for the other. In other words, a ‘win/lose’.