Free Book Summary : Negotiate Like the Pros

Free Book Summary : Negotiate Like the Pros A Top Sports Negotiator’s Lessons for Making Deals, Building Relationships, and Getting What You Want

Author: Kenneth L. Shropshire
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-07-154831-1
208 pages

The Big Idea

Do you want to be a better negotiator? Do you want to negotiate with the same success and confidence that you see among the professionals who handle teams, leagues, athletes – the sort of people you see in the sports pages and on ESPN – on a daily basis? In Negotiate Like the Pros, author Kenneth L. Shropshire explores powerful negotiating strategies, and teaches you how to use them to score big in any negotiation.

Prepare With Passion

To begin, you’ll have to understand both how to prepare and why taking the time to do so can be the most valuable transformation you can make in your negotiating life. That viewpoint dominates in sports, and it should be just as prevalent in business dealings.

Establish the road map to get from the beginning of the negotiation to the end result that you desire. Your counterpart will of course want to establish an agenda that will drive the conversation in a direction most favorable to him or her.

Begin with the basics - preparation puts you in the best possible position to win, whatever winning might be in a given setting.

Be prepared for negative circumstances as well as for positive ones. Your counterpart may know that single piece of information you thought he lacked. He may actually have another option that you did not foresee.

Stick with Your Style

Understand your most comfortable bargaining style as well as how to use it to your advantage rather than fretting about a style that does not come easily to you. In sports, we most often express this as “playing within yourself.”

It is vital to know who you are and who your opponent is in terms of style and, maybe more importantly, not to try to be someone you are not. Discover your strengths and base your preparation strategy on them. Be honest with yourself about what kind of negotiator you are, what you’re good at, and what you are not so good at.

Make the negotiation environment as favorable as possible to your style and your comfort level. Once you have a grasp of your style, you want to set the stage for the negotiation so that it is advantageous to you and detrimental to your counterpart.

Set Goals and Aim High

It is important to establish goals and make them a regular part of your preparation process. It is not unusual for sports teams to begin a season aiming for an event or for the Olympics by setting goals for the number and types of medals they will win. It is clear that the higher your goals are and the more support you have for them, the more successful you are likely to be.

Know your walk-away point. What is the minimum you will accept? Be as firm as you can about your walk-away point as you enter the negotiation. The best way to determine your walk-away point is to focus on your options.

What is the number, quantity, price, or whatever the metric is that you think, given the full impact of all of the information available, will close the deal fairly? This is the target, the bull’s-eye.

How should you establish goals? You do so with reference points, indicators that point you in the direction you want to go.

Seek Leverage

When establishing leverage, honesty is essential. Anyone can have success with a single deceitful act – maybe even several successes. But once your credibility is damaged, it is nearly impossible to get it back.

Leverage is fleeting. Circumstances can change, and you can lose it. How the parties view the future value of a deal is a fleeting concept too, but it comes up frequently in sports when the endorsement value of an unproven athlete needs to be determined.

Leverage is often supported, too, by the element of consistency. People want the same standard applied to them that was applied to others. People want to be perceived as being reasonable and want to act consistently for that reason.

Focus on Relationships and Interests

Go beyond the monetary side of deals and focus your attention on the other benefits that flow from them. For an athlete, such a side benefit may be a supportive relationship with the hometown crowd, as opposed to moving to a new city as a free agent for more money. In business, this benefit may be likened to a long-term relationship with a vendor or boss.

Those most successful in courting relationships take the time and make the effort to understand the interests of their clients. In most deals, this means that you need to comprehend what there is in a relationship with a counterpart that is important beyond the dollars and cents of the deal.

In creating your game plan, leave adequate time for thinking about relationships. The value of those relationships will be individual as well as cultural. If you are negotiating in another country, or with someone from a different country, be aware of the special issues that might be presented by virtue of this diversity.

Often those interests, the real reasons why someone wants to get a deal done, are non-monetary. The two are intertwined, as you cannot always get to a party’s interests unless you extend the effort to develop a relationship.

Fully contemplate the importance of current and future negotiations. Make sure, too, that you understand your counterpart’s true interest in closing the deal.

Negotiate Like a Pro

Winning certainly has a different meaning in every negotiation. Achieving that desired outcome is most likely to occur when we use all of the skills that we possess in a carefully prepared manner. Be prepared.

The magic of success really comes when you are able to practice with the same intensity that you use when you play, but are also able to play the game with the same relatively relaxed frame of mind that you have in practice. That is the challenge.

So where do we end up? With the lesson so many of us heard from our parents: do the best you can. You will know you are doing that when you combine all of the elements laid out in this book. Your bets get even better if your preparation is done at the highest level. You are not doing the best you can if you have not fully prepared.

To read the full 12-page summary of the book, please visit BusinessSummaries.com.