Effect on Customers

Successful negotiations can lead to increased profits, but can also lead to greater customer satisfaction. For example, you are buying a second car and you see a car advertised in the paper for £14,500. You decide to make an ambitious offer to see how they react. You offer £11,000 and they accept your offer immediately. How do you feel?

Most people feel two things in quick succession:

1. I could have done better

2. There must be something wrong with the car

Think of this next time you are negotiating for your business with a customer or supplier. Are you.being fair. by offering your best price first time? What impact has your action had on the way the other side feels?

The objective of successful negotiation is not necessarily to charge the highest possible prices for your products, or to pay the minimum price possible for your supplies, but to creatively put together solutions to problems that ensure:

- The best possible outcome for your business.

- Clients and suppliers who are happy to do business with you.

- A reputation for being a tough negotiator while earning the respect of those with whom you negotiate.

Modern Negotiations - a look at negotiating in the 21st Century

As the euphoria surrounding the dawning of the third millennium fades, the realities of our future world increasingly confront us. When we, as business leaders, pause to read the messages inscribed into the closing decades of the past century, we find that we are increasingly caught up in the crossfire of technological demands.

If we are to successfully conduct our business in future, we have little choice but to creatively respond to these demands. Were we to consider ignoring them, the words of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass - “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run twice as fast as that.” - are likely to haunt us. Negotiators who fail to keep pace with today’s ever-changing business landscape are destined to find they run in place with poor Alice.