Secrets of Power Negotiating Book Summary - Secrets of Power Negotiating Book explained in key points

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Secrets of Power Negotiating summary

Name: Secrets of Power Negotiating
Rating: 4.5 (261 reviews)
Author: Roger Dawson

Roger Dawson

Inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator

4.5 (261 ratings)

31 mins

Topics

Negotiations

Table of Contents

Secrets of Power Negotiating
Summary of 12 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 12

What’s in it for me? Feel confident the next time you sit down at the negotiating table.

When expert chess players compete against each other, they don’t just improvise their moves on the chessboard. They come to the game prepared with an arsenal of gambits. These are strategic moves that involve some degree of risk, but can give a player a major advantage if they’re deployed in the right way, at the right time.

Power negotiators also have gambits. They can be divided into three categories, which correspond to the three phases of negotiation: the beginning, middle and end. Beginning gambits are the opening moves you can use to secure a strong foothold at the start of a negotiation. Middle gambits then help you to move the negotiation in the direction you want it to go. Finally, ending gambits enable you to seal the deal in your favor.

In these blinks, you’ll learn how to use all three types of gambit. Taking you from the beginning to the end of a successful negotiation, the blinks will also teach you some of the most crucial principles and concepts of power negotiating.

Along the way, you’ll find out

how to meet someone halfway and still get exactly what you want;
why you should never accept someone else’s first offer, even if it’s a good deal; and
how to handle a negotiator who’s being too stubborn or greedy.

To establish a favorable negotiating range, ask for more than you expect to receive.

Imagine you want to buy a new car. The salesperson’s asking price is $18,000, and your goal is to get him down to $15,000 – a difference of $3,000. To start the negotiation, you have to put in an initial offer. What should you do?

The answer is one of the most crucial beginning gambits of power negotiating: you should ask for a better deal than you expect to receive. By doing this, you can avoid one of the most common mistakes novice negotiators make: giving up too much ground too early.

If you come right out at the beginning and offer $15,000 for the car, you’re going to end up giving away most of that $3,000 difference between your price and the salesperson’s price before the negotiation has even really begun. After all, unless it’s his first day on the job, he’s going to push back against whatever number you throw out – and even if things go well, you’ll probably end up somewhere halfway between your respective starting positions.

The distance between those two positions establishes your negotiating range – the space between which you and the salesperson will try to reach a compromise. The lower your initial offer, the wider the range. If you make your initial offer low enough, the range will be so wide that your target price will end up being right in the middle. And in that case, if you and your counterpart meet each other halfway, you’ll get exactly what you want!

That’s what’s called bracketing: making an initial offer that turns your target price into the midpoint of the negotiating range.

To return to our example, if the salesperson’s asking price is $18,000 and your target price is $15,000, you’d bracket your target price by making an initial offer of $12,000 – $3,000 lower than your target price, just as the asking price is $3,000 higher.

If you’re on the other side of the negotiating table, you’d follow the same principles, only in reverse. For example, let’s say you’re a widget salesperson. Your potential buyer offers to pay you $1.50 per widget. You’re hoping for $1.75. What’s your initial counteroffer? That’s right: $2.00 – bracketing your target price by putting $0.25 of negotiating space on either side of it.

Negotiating gambits have a broad range of applications.

Asking for a better deal than you expect to receive is crucial to negotiating a favorable outcome in a sales transaction – but the applications of the gambit go well beyond that.

Besides using the gambit in negotiating any deal that involves money, such as a raise, you can also use it for other, nonmonetary aspects of a deal. For instance, if you’re buying a piece of real estate, you might request an unrealistically large number of revisions to the paperwork, under the expectation that only a fraction of them will be accepted by the seller.

Carefully chosen body language and verbal language can have a big impact when negotiating.

As you’ve probably gathered, power negotiating involves a fair amount of bluffing. You don’t really expect to buy that $10,000 second-hand boat for $5,000; you’re just using that offer as a way of widening your negotiating range and bracketing your target price of $7,500. Moreover, the owner isn’t actually reluctant to sell his boat; he’s just putting on an act so you’ll make a better offer.

The same is true of another beginning gambit: flinching. To continue with the same example, when the boat owner proposes his initial sale price of $10,000, you should act visibly shocked that he would propose such a number – even if it’s entirely reasonable! If you’re a good enough performer (and the owner is a bad enough negotiator), he might respond by immediately lowering his asking price. Even if you don’t get that lucky, you’re still communicating that the price is unacceptable to you in a way that’s much more convincing than words alone.

Even if it’s a great deal, you shouldn’t accept the other side’s first offer.

We’re now going to look at one last beginning gambit – but it’s certainly not the least important. Indeed, it represents one of the cardinal rules of power negotiating: never accept the other side’s initial offer.

If you’re buying or selling something and the other person is the first party to propose a price, the rationale here is obvious: you could get a better price by making a counteroffer and negotiating further. But what if you’re the one receiving an initial counteroffer? And what if it seems like a great deal? Your inclination might be to pounce on it.

Continue to use the technique of bracketing and taper your concessions during the middle phase of negotiating.

We now come to the middle phase of negotiation. At this point, you’ll have used your beginning gambits to establish a negotiating range that’s favorable to you. Now it’s time for you and your counterpart to start moving closer to each other, to try to converge on a deal.

If it’s a price you’re trying to agree upon in a sales transaction, the buyer will attempt to get the seller to come down, and the seller will attempt to get the buyer to come up. One party has already made an initial offer, the other has made an initial counteroffer, and now the two of you start making further counteroffers back and forth.

Always insist on a trade-off.

As we’ve seen, the middle phase of a negotiation is all about making shrewd concessions. You’re giving up ground to the other party, but you’re being careful not to give up too much too quickly. You’re also insisting that they give up an equal, if not greater, amount of ground in response.

This brings us to one of the keys to success in the middle-phase of negotiation: the trade-off gambit. It boils down to a rule: never make a concession without asking for one in return. For example, imagine you’re selling a house, and the buyer asks if she can move some furniture into the garage before taking ownership of the property. Now, even if the garage is empty and you couldn’t care less about it, you don’t want to give away this concession without requesting a trade-off.

To avoid making concessions and position yourself as more of an ally than an adversary, invoke a higher authority.

Imagine you’re a salesperson for a midsize paper company, and you’re working out a deal with a client. In the middle of the negotiation, she asks you to make a significant concession: adding expedited shipping to her large order of paper supplies. Knowing about the trade-off gambit, you ask her what she can give you in return. But then comes her cold, hard response: “nothing.”

It seems like you’ve reached a dead end. What do you do?

If a negotiation gets bogged down, be prepared to call in a third party or even walk away.

Let’s say you’re in the middle of a sales negotiation, and you’ve pulled out all the stops. You’ve flinched, bracketed, invoked a higher authority – you name it; you’ve tried it, but nothing is working. Your client is still insisting on free expedited delivery for her order of office paper. Now it seems like the negotiation has truly hit a wall. How do you break through it?

If you’re really stuck, one option is to bring in a third party to provide a fresh perspective and propose a new solution. This could be a neutral third party, like a professional mediator or arbitrator. But it could also just be someone who can play the role of intermediary – even if he’s technically on your side. For example, as a salesperson, you might call in your manager.

When an issue becomes a sticking point, set it aside for later.

There’s no shame in calling in an arbitrator or walking away from a stalled-out negotiation. If it has to happen, it has to happen. But before you take one of these more drastic measures, there are a couple of less dramatic tactics you should try out.

The first is to shake things up. There are many ways to do this, depending on the situation. You could change the setting of the negotiation by suggesting you continue the conversation over dinner. You could lighten the mood by talking about your hobbies or some juicy industry gossip. You could bring in some fresh energy by switching up the members of your negotiating team. Whatever you do, the point is simply to thaw the ice and keep the flame of the negotiation alive.

At the end of a negotiation, it’s easy to get a small concession from the other side.

The more time and energy we invest into an enterprise, the less we want it to go to waste. The more we think of something as being ours, the less we want to let go of it. And the more we feel ourselves nearing the finish line, the less we want to stumble in the final stretch.

In the end phase of negotiation, the set-aside gambit takes advantage of these psychological foibles – using them to pressure the other side into making a concession they might not otherwise make. This is the same for the next gambit we’re going to look at: nibbling.

If the other side of a negotiation gets a little too greedy, you can respond by withdrawing an offer.

Just like nibbling, the next end-phase gambit we’re going to look at also takes advantage of the fact that people don’t like to lose things they’ve already come to think of as being theirs. It’s a risky but powerful way to bring the end phase of a negotiation to a close when the other side is being stubborn and trying to push their luck too far.

If you find yourself in such a situation, you can try withdrawing an offer. To understand how it works, imagine you’re a salesperson in the end phase of a negotiation over an order of widgets. Your initial offer was $2.00 per widget; the buyer’s initial counteroffer was $1.50. After a lot of back and forth, you come down to $1.75, and it seems like the buyer is ready to settle on this price. But then he gets a little greedy. After all, he figures, if you were willing to come down by $0.25, surely he can squeeze one more cent out of you. So he starts insisting on $1.74.

When you’ve done a good job of negotiating, sugarcoat the deal to make it an easier pill for the other side to swallow.

From asking for more than you expect to receive to withdrawing an offer under made-up pretenses, there’s a fair amount of trickery involved in many of the negotiating gambits we’ve been exploring. If this has left a sour taste in your mouth, you’re in luck: the last gambit we’re going to look at allows you to end a negotiation on a sweeter note.

Let’s start with the general scenario in which you’d use it. Imagine you’ve been using all of the gambits you’ve learned in these blinks, and you’ve been doing really well in your negotiation – in fact, you’ve been doing a little too well. You’ve gotten the other side to make so many concessions that he’s feeling pretty beat at this point. He’s almost ready to reach an agreement with you, but there’s one last thing standing in the way: his pride. He just doesn’t want to admit defeat, and needs a way to save face.

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What is Secrets of Power Negotiating about?

Secrets of Power Negotiating (1987) reveals the tricks of the master negotiator’s trade. Based on time-tested principles that are aimed at finding win-win solutions for both parties of any given negotiation, it teaches the tactics and strategies for effectively negotiating deals in a wide range of industries and situations. Whether you’re buying a product, selling a service or just trying to reach an agreement with your partner, you’ll be able to use power negotiator Roger Dawson’s secrets to negotiate with confidence and success.

Who should read Secrets of Power Negotiating ?

Novice negotiators wanting to enhance their skills
Experienced negotiators looking for some new tricks
Anyone who wishes to become more comfortable with negotiating

About the Author

Roger Dawson has been a full-time author and speaker on the topics of negotiation, persuasion, decision-making and problem-solving since 1982. Before this, he had a successful career as a power negotiator in the real estate industry. He’s taught his secrets to success to hundreds of thousands of people through audio programs, seminars and lectures. His other books include Secrets of Power Problem Solving (2010), Secrets of Power Salary Negotiating (2006) and Secrets of Power Persuasion (1992). In 1991, he was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame.

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