Negotiation Skills Company, Inc.
 
Negotiation Skills Company, Inc.

Title Image
Q & A Table of Contents

Selling Deals In-house

From: Francis, Accra, Ghana

Question: What strategies are critical in communicating the outcome of negotiation to make it sell to the entire workforce — particularly, when the outcome is not good?

Response: A good negotiator — or negotiation team — includes consideration of other stakeholders within their organization when they prepare for negotiation. Learning the interests of colleagues (from one’s own silo or from others) is a crucial element of preparation. Negotiators can learn whether the deal they anticipate reaching with outside parties will have needed support within their organization if they ask colleagues a variety of questions including: “How can a deal we make help you achieve your objectives?” “What can you tell us about the group with whom we’ll be negotiating — their veracity, dependability, the quality of their products, etc.?” “What would you assume about the other party’s interests and/or objectives? What information should we pursue in our negotiations to determine whether those assumptions are accurate?”

Getting your colleagues involved in your preparation for negotiation gives them a feeling you are taking them seriously, helps them feel they’ve contributed to the ultimate outcome, and provides you a framework to use in explaining the ultimate results within your organization. Moreover, conferring with your colleagues who may not be involved in the formal negotiations could well yield crucial information that will increase your capacity to negotiate wisely.

Unfortunately, the scenario you describe indicates the preparatory steps suggested above were not taken. As a result, the negotiators went into the process underprepared; not only have they failed to get a clear indication (before the negotiations) of whether they’ll get buy- in from the rest of the workforce after the fact; they have also undercut their post-negotiation credibility with their colleagues.

In this circumstance, before publicizing the negotiation’s outcome it could make sense to do some internal information-gathering with other parts of the workforce. Find out what each department or group of people is likely to think about a variety of possible outcomes from the negotiation — both the actual outcomes and theoretical alternatives. Try to discover the criteria each group of colleagues is likely to use as a benchmark for determining whether that particular result is good or bad.

Once you have done this research you should use the information gained to design a marketing plan to ‘sell’ the actual result to your colleagues. It is not a matter of creating a propaganda campaign, but rather preparation for an internal negotiation process to bring about buy-in by your colleagues. If you have a reasonable good understanding of their interests and how they determine what makes them comfortable with a particular outcome, it increases your chances of designing and implementing a process that increases their acceptance — and perhaps even enthusiasm — for the result reached in the external negotiation.

Going backwards as described above is definitely nowhere near as wise as upfront internal preparation. Your negotiators have created a risky situation by failing to prepare using collaborative internal decision- making; now the job is to minimize the damage they have caused by that failure to prepare.

Good luck,
Steve

The Negotiation Skills Company, Inc.   P O Box 172   Pride's Crossing, MA 01965, USA   
Voice: +1 978-927-6775     FAX: +1 978-921-4447
WEB: www.NegotiationSkills.com   E-mail: tnsc@negotiationskills.com
Designed by: Online Marketing Strategies