Everyone has their own negotiating style, but what does your own style of negotiating really reveal about you? In addition, what can someone else’s negotiating style reveal to you about them, too, and can their style give you some clues as to whether or not you’d even want to do business with them?
Ideally, you want to be someone who is both firm and fair in your negotiating style. But if you really wanted to, you could be someone who communicates that they really want to get every single dime out of the other person, without any care or respect for them. But is this really the message that you want to be sending out to other people about you? With this in mind, we’ve all encountered people like this, and they normally don’t leave a very good taste within us. In fact, they oftentimes make us feel like we never, ever, want to do business with them again.
In addition, you don’t want to be someone who reneges on your word during your negotiations either. When you agree to do something, stick with it, because it’s the honorable thing to do. When you’re in negotiations, and then the other person changes their mind about what they already told you was acceptable to them, this again will give you a bad feeling about the person. So just know that if you choose to do this yourself when you’re negotiating, people will be feeling the exact same way about you.
Bring integrity into your negotiations, because if this is what you truly stand for, you’ll be communicating this to your people, and they’ll respect you for it. In addition, they’ll be telling others about these fine qualities that you’ve been exuding towards them, too.
Then when you’re looking out for your own best interests when you’re negotiating, you ideally want to be flexible and understand the areas that you can give and take within between both you and the specific individual who you’re negotiating with. With this in mind, sometimes negotiating can feel like it’s two bulls circling around each other, looking to find the opportunity, and when you can both give and take, you then create the best opportunity for the two of you to feel that you’ve both gotten what you really wanted out of the negotiations. Because when you play hardball and you’re not willing to give anything to the other side, people will oftentimes just walk away.
So stand for what you believe in, and look for the areas that you can be flexible in when you’re negotiating with people. When you do this, not only will people respect you for how you’re treating them, but you’ll be far more likely to close a greater number of transactions when you’re negotiating with people, too.
