I wanted to share with you 4 Fast Ways to Improve your Negotiation Skills.

Now negotiation skills are something that people typically relate to being exclusive to salespeople or lawyers, but that’s not always the case.

Negotiation skills can serve you in so many different areas, whether it be in your professional world, with your colleagues, even at home, negotiating with others, or with family.

You can always benefit from negotiation skills so I’m going to give you four (4) quick ways that you can use to improve your negotiation skills. Some things you may not have thought of before.

1. Don’t Compete When Negotiating

Too often people go into negotiations with a ruthless approach and both people are trying to defeat each other as if they were in a gladiator ring. When this happens, negotiations are just going to slow down.

It doesn’t benefit anyone.

Ultimately, you want two people to be seeking a win-win scenario, but worst-case scenario each person is coming out with an outcome that they can live with.

When you are pursuing to defeat or even punish the other person, it prevents you from seeing the opportunity, and it also prevents you from actively listening to what the other person has to say. The bad side to that is that you miss opportunities that you may not have heard about before.  You want to be focusing on partnerships, opportunities and joint ventures or other avenues you hadn’t considered before that are win-win outcomes.

If you focused on a defense approach or a conquering approach, you’re not actively listening and you’re not hearing those opportunities present themselves.

2. Always Have an Alternative Offer for your Negotiation

Always have a backup. Think about your limitations and what you could live with if you absolutely had to, it’s something that can kind of pull out if you need to.

So, if you’re not happy with the offer that someone has proposed to you don’t walk away but rather propose an alternative offer, introduce your proposal and try to negotiate with them, offering an alternative option It’s likely that it is something you are willing to accept. It might not be the top-tier option, but it’s something that you can live with. Ultimately, you’re not going to lose. You were always going to walk away anyway.

3. Pre-framing

This is the most important thing. The better you can get by doing this and using little nuances in your language will support you NLP practitioners are very good at this.

This is priming the environment and the conversation to be very fertile for negotiation. Framing is used when you are creating the environment for presenting your offer. It determines the success or the failure of the offer that you are giving to people.

It works well to demonstrate a risk option and a secure option. People have different levels of how much risk they are willing to take. So, if you are giving people the secure option as well as the risk option, then they can generally find something or somewhere that matches them.

Professional people typically want to make a sensible choice while others are willing to take a greater risk if it is worth it. The goal here is to identify the breaking point and where they are going to be risk-averse, where there is something that’s holding them back.

4. Keep the End in Mind

We just keep the end in mind, don’t get caught up in the details, and don’t get bogged down with the path that you take to the final destination.

The result, not the process, is the most important.

At the end of the day, if both people have a happy outcome or a win-win situation and end up with a situation that they can live with, then that’s a good outcome. Getting bogged down with all of the finer details that don’t serve the bigger picture is not worth it and can really impede upon negotiation.

So, I’d love to hear from you.

What are your negotiation tips?

What have you found that works well?

There are so many little things out there, I’ve Just shared four with you, so I’d love to hear what your negotiation tips are, so please comment below.