Negotiate Like the Pros

A Top Sports Negotiator’s Lessons for Making Deals, Building Relationships, and Getting What You Want by Kenneth L. Shropshire

The Big Idea
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?

Negotiate Like the Pros tells the stories behind some of the most notable, complex, and lucrative sports deals of all time. A world-class negotiator in his own right, Kenneth L. Shropshire uses those stories to explore powerful negotiating strategies, and teaches you how to use them to score big in any negotiation.


Why You Need This Book
In Negotiate Like the Pros, Shropshire tells the stories behind some of the most sensational sports deals of all time and extracts powerful lessons on the skills you need to master to become a top-notch dealmaker.

This book offers an approach that challenges you to mentally analyze your own negotiating techniques, style, relationship-building strategies, and powers of persuasion. If you want to become stellar at deal making, building relationships, persuasion, and even leadership, then this book is for you – whether you are a sports fan or not.


Prepare With Passion
To begin, you’ll have to focus on the most important element in any negotiation: preparation. You’ll 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. There are many coaching admonitions that dwell on the phrase “just do your job.”

CULTURAL, GENDER, AND RACIAL DIFFERENCES
In any global negotiation, you must take the time to learn and understand the negotiating style of the culture of your negotiating partner. Just as you wouldn’t like to be stereotyped as an “American-style” negotiator, those in other cultures also do not want to be stereotyped.

AGENDA SETTING
An important part of planning any detailed negotiation is to establish the road map to get from the beginning of the negotiation to the end result that you desire.

CONTEMPLATING THE APPROACH
Another key piece of the preparation phase is determining if there are any steps you can take to move your position forward that will be viewed positively by the decision maker on the other side.

According to successful coach John Wooden: “I believe there is nothing wrong with the other fellow being better than you are if you’ve prepared and are functioning in the way you’ve tried to prepare. Preparation puts you in the best possible position to win, whatever winning might be in a given setting.

ESTABLISHING CREDIBILITY
Credibility is important on two levels: your personal credibility and the credibility of the information you bring to the table. Even your counterpart will respect you more if you are credible.

WORST-CASE SCENARIO
You must be prepared for negative circumstances as well as for positive ones. Your counterpart may know that single piece of information you thought he lacked. Spend some time thinking about that worst-case scenario and how you will respond to it.


Stick with Your Style
This chapter guides you through both understanding 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.”

REVEL IN YOUR STYLE
Discover your strengths and base your preparation strategy on them. It is easy to be yourself for the long haul; imitating another style is a formula for potential failure. Be yourself, and assert that style to the fullest.

As much as you can control it, you want the negotiation environment to be 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
This chapter relays the value of establishing goals and making 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.

THE POWER OF GOALS
There is a psychology to getting successful negotiation results that is underused: visualizing the end result. The concept of visualization is valuable for everybody. You are more likely to accomplish goals if you actually have them and then picture them in your mind. You are certainly more likely to achieve success if you have goals than if you don’t have them.

GOALS, TARGETS, AND WALK-AWAY POINTS
If in the course of the negotiation you can deliver your plea and it passes the chuckle test (that is, no one laughs out loud at the suggestion), that is probably your goal position.

You should also know your walk-away point. Be as firm as you can about your walk-away point as you enter the negotiation. The target requires a high level of precision. 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.

REFERENCE POINTS
Saying that you need to have a goal, target, and walk-away point is easy enough, but how should you establish goals? You do so with reference points, indicators that point you in the direction you want to go.


Seek Leverage
This chapter explores how lying and negotiating somehow seem to go hand in hand. It helps you push back against lying while focusing on the topic that is lied about most: tales told to create leverage. In sports and non-sports negotiations, the most prevalent lie is about how interested potential bidders really are in your goods or services.

LYING
When establishing leverage, honesty is essential. Anyone can have success with a single deceitful act – maybe even several successes. Caution: In your preparation, develop your game plan regarding competing offers carefully. But, of course, if you lie and get away with it, you may have substantially improved your position, unless your lie is uncovered.

LEVERAGE VIA TIMING
There are two issues related to timing and leverage that are important. The first is that leverage is fleeting. The other timing issue is how the parties view the future value of a deal.

LEVERAGE FROM CONSISTENCY
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. This is especially the case where there is public information on similar previous deals.


Focus on Relationships and Interests
This chapter takes you beyond the monetary side of deals and focuses 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.

VALUING RELATIONSHIPS
The best negotiators incorporate a focus on relationships into their initial preparation as well as during the negotiation itself.

INTERESTS
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.

ALIGNING INTERESTS
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.

Closely coupled with relationships is the importance of understanding the interests of the other side and those associated with them.

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.


RELATIONSHIPS IMPACTING FUTURE NEGOTIATIONS
Fully contemplate the importance of current and future negotiations. Make sure, too, that you understand your counterpart’s true interest in closing the deal. To be a successful negotiator, you must embrace the negotiating process and be fully engaged in seeking the best deal your circumstances allow.


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.

The important point is that you must be prepared. Do the “practice” phase as thoroughly as possible.

Your bets get even better if your preparation is done at the highest level.

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