Negotiation Skills

"Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties are more anxious to agree than to disagree"

Dean Acheson

Negotiation is a skill that we use almost every day. However, negotiation is also one of those skills that everyone learns on the job. From early age, kids learn how to negotiate with their parents over what they want and enhance this skill as they learn from their success. However, as we grow we seem to lose that skill and become less successful in getting exactly what we want. Somehow our perspective changes and we develop bad habits. Unfortunately, most people are not trained systematically on negotiations even though this skill can be quite beneficial to them in both their personal and professional lives.

The course also contains a number of optional exercises which along with the broad content provided makes it easy to extend the course to 1.5 days if necessary. Instructions on this are provided in the guidelines for trainers included in the pack to pace the course correctly.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Introduction to Negotiation

• Why do you need to negotiate?
• What types of negotiations exist?
• What are the characteristics of a confident negotiator?
• How to handle conflicts in negotiations
• What steps do you need to go through when negotiating?
• What is the difference between negotiation and persuasion?

Negotiation Strategy

• What outcome should you aim for?
• How to perform Outcome Analysis
• What is the best negotiation strategy?
• Should you bargain over positions explicitly?
• What is principled negotiation?
• What strategies can you use to take the upper hand in negotiations?
• What can you do to move the negotiation forward when you think it is getting stuck?

How to Negotiate

• What is the 8-Step negotiation preparation guide?
• How to discuss negotiation variables
• How to set your selling or buying limits systematically
• How to manage your Settlement Range
• How to manage concessions when you give them or receive them
• How to break deadlocks
• How to settle a negotiation to get what you asked for
• How to close a negotiation

Emotions in Negotiations

• How to handle negotiations emotionally
• How to bargain effectively
• How to take advantage of human emotional reaction and use that to your benefit
• How to take advantage of body language
• How to express your disagreement while maintaining the relationship

Handling Psychological Tactics in Negotiations

• What are psychological tactics used in negotiations and how to respond to them
• How to handle an angry negotiator
• How to respond to shock tactics
• How to big up your side of the negotiation and bring down theirs
• How to handle their lack of authority to proceed
• How to respond when you are given only one choice
• How to handle a demanding negotiator

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 or 1.5 days. The course contains a lot of content and many practical exercises that can easily be extended to cover more than one day.

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Understand the underlying principles of negotiation and learn what you can do to get the best outcome
• Use a negotiation strategy that moves you closer to a win/win outcome
• Prepare for negotiation by following a step-by-step approach and set your critical limits
• Use a set of psychological tactics to explore the other side’s motives and learn how to respond to tactics used by them
• Derive specific values based on your negotiation variables and use them to bargain systematically over your settlement range
• Finalise the outcome of your negotiation to get exactly what you have asked for

We constantly research a variety of fields such as psychology, game theory, body language, influence and real-life negotiations to enhance this course

To convince, sometimes all you need is serious eye contact!

At Skills Converged, we believe that one of the best ways to learn is by going through examples. Important negotiation principles in this course are always accompanied by examples as this makes it easier for delegates to understand the topic rather than just to be given a number of guidelines to read. Examples followed by exercises greatly help the delegates to immediately put what they learned into practice and test it out for themselves. This process helps delegates to memorise the process faster while it allows the trainer to easily teach the topic, monitor the delegates’ progress and provide feedback based on their specific performance. Since the skills are transferred through easy-to-follow logical step-by step guides, it is easy for the trainers to teach the topic and the delegates to learn them. This approach makes this course highly effective in teaching negotiation skills while also makes it easy for trainers to prepare themselves to deliver it.

We constantly re-examine the course based on feedback received from delegates and trainers to further streamline the process and increase the efficiency of the course.