negotiations examplesImprove your skills with insights from this collection of short articles with real-world negotiation examples. Below you will find examples of various negotiation topics, including preparation, concessions, leverage, value, tactics, intimidation and more.

And for a much more thorough discussion of negotiation tactics, download our complimentary whitepaper “Negotiation Games: Spotting and Neutralizing Five Tactics that can Damage Deals”.

Preparation & Tactics
International Negotiations
  
Sales Negotiations
Negotiations Team

Negotiation Examples: The Power of Agenda Management

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The “time factor” — how you manage it against other considerations and use the high-level (or macro) agenda to help create agreement has a huge impact on your success!

This was certainly the case during an engagement with one of our technology clients, whose customer was in the European auto segment. All of our client’s revenue with this automaker was in jeopardy when the automaker announced that a purchasing freeze would be in effect at the beginning of the coming year, due to deteriorating economic conditions and new IT management. Since it was October, these developments required immediate action and a clear agenda that would culminate in closure before end of year. Read more

Negotiation Mistakes: Own Them, Move on and Prosper

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Have you found yourself exasperated by a colleague or partner who won’t own his or her mistakes? The minute an error is discovered, they offer excuses and deflections instead of responsibility and solutions. This is not only a time-waster because you have to take extra steps getting to the heart of the problem, but your whole team loses credibility and the value of your business relationship is undermined.

At K&R, we use the term Negotiation Capital™ to illustrate the goodwill that is created through credibility, good relationships and successful delivery. Negotiation Capital is like “currency.” It translates into the other side’s willingness to move closer to your way of thinking. If you lose credibility or have to backtrack due to mistakes, then you use Negotiation Capital as if you were “burning” currency. The other side’s willingness to deal with you and to compromise is reduced. Read more

K&R CEO Mladen Kresic Discusses Negotiation Know-it-Alls with Knowledge@Wharton Host Dan Loney

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K&R CEO Mladen Kresic Discusses Negotiation Know-it-Alls with Knowledge@Wharton Host Dan Loney (Complete Transcript)

On Friday, May 20 K&R CEO Mladen Kresic joined Knowledge@Wharton (Sirius XM Channel 111) host Dan Loney to talk about how negotiators can keep “know-it-alls” from ruining their next big deal. (Kresic wrote on the subject in his 2016 white paper, “Dealing with Negotiation Know-It-Alls: How to Keep Instructors, Intimidators and Impostors from Derailing Your Deal.”

During this segment, Loney and Kresic discussed the three major types of know-it-all (The Instructor, The Intimidator and The Impostor), the threats they represent to successful negotiations, and strategies negotiators can use to mitigate their negative influence and keep their deal discussions on track.

This content reproduced courtesy of Sirius XM and Knowledge@Wharton.

Loney: Have you ever been part of a negotiation and feel like you’re hitting your head on a brick wall because the person on the other side is the “know-it-all”? It can be one of the most frustrating things to deal with, but there may be some hope. Mladen Kresic returns to the show. He’s the president and Chief Executive Officer of K&R Negotiations. He’s recently published a white paper on the problem and how you can handle the situation — and maybe even make it work for you. Mladen, the author of Negotiate Wisely in Business and Technology, is joining us on the show right now. Great to catch up with you, Mladen. How have you been? Read more

The Importance and Impact of Setting Priorities in Negotiations: The CBA, Deflategate and Tom Brady

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Fans of American football are watching with great interest the recent developments around “Deflategate.”1 Of course, the drama always increases when a superstar such as Tom Brady is involved.

One of the controversial aspects in this evolving saga is the power of the National Football League (NFL) commissioner, Roger Goodell. Goodell handed the four-game suspension penalty to Mr. Brady, in part for his lack of cooperation in the investigation, but is also the “hearing officer” who reviewed and made the judgement on Mr. Brady’s appeal of that penalty. Read more

When Emotions Compromise Your Negotiation Leverage

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Successful businesspeople like to think of themselves as rational beings that apply thorough analysis to get optimal outcomes. Of course, this is not always the case. We’re humans, not optimizing machines: We’re biased towards doing business with people we like and trust; we succumb to pride when a calmer perspective would have yielded a better outcome for everybody; we get emotionally invested in a deal and can lose focus of its true merits.

It is easy to become emotionally invested in a deal, especially a complex one that has required a large time and resource commitment from you and your team. Nobody wants to simply walk away from something they have cultivated for months—even when the rationale for actually doing the deal starts to dwindle. Read more

Unprincipled Concessions Cost You Money at the Negotiating Table

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Spot Them, Avoid Them and Close Faster

Unprincipled concessions are concessions not tied to a credible business rationale. Years of research show us that this simple business negotiation mistake costs companies between 9 and 18% of their gross operating revenue.

Principled Concessions Infographic

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Negotiation Examples: Managing Internal Conflict

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negotiation examples managing internal conflict
Not all books on negotiation skills cover how to handle internal dissension or conflict during important negotiations. There’s a reason we included it as the third of K&R’s Six Principles™ of Negotiation: A team divided is a costly team.

Here is an example of how one of our seasoned negotiation consultants, “Hank,” handled a very difficult situation with a member of his own team before joining us at K&R.

Hank’s client had put together a strong team to negotiate a deal with an Israeli company. This was one of his client’s biggest deals ever in the country; huge commissions were riding on it. Read more

International Negotiation: The Facts and The Culture

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We once assisted a Japanese client company (we can call them “Friendly”) in negotiating a strategic alliance with an American company (whom we will call “Abrasive”) that had a reputation for being challenging. Prior to our meeting, we contacted a colleague who had done business with Abrasive. Our friend warned us that the lead negotiator would be very confrontational.

Understanding that our clients at Friendly were inclined to maintain harmony, we discussed the potential problem with them beforehand. We asked them to let us handle any adversarial moments.

Not long after negotiations began, the lead negotiator for Adversarial announced, “We are going to use our contract, and if you don’t like it, you can leave!” Read more

Negotiation Examples: The Value of Persistence

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negotiation motivation

I often ask people, “Who are the best negotiators in the world?” The most common answer is, “Children.” Yet, children have never been trained in negotiations (certainly not by us). What makes them such naturally effective negotiators?

There are a number of answers to that question. For example, children use tactics of emotional blackmail (screaming in a public place) or they will “negotiate” with principled concessions (“I will eat the peas if you let me stay up until 10.”). The answer we hear most often is that children are naturally persistent – they just don’t take “no” for an answer. Their wants are simple (“I want a cookie.”), yet they have the willingness to repeat the request as often as needed to get their desired outcome. Any parent can tell you about a repetitive argument they’ve had with their child – the child, being persistent and having absolutely no sense of time pressure, simply repeats the same argument over and over again until the parent loses patience and gives in. Read more

Negotiation Examples: Knowing How the Other Team Approves a Deal

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negotiation motivation

Knowing how people are measured for bonuses, rankings, commissions or promotions helps you determine the personal motivations that can be just as important as company position when it comes to closing the deal.

Simply making someone’s job easier can be a major motivation. Here’s a software negotiation story from the K&R files:

It was the middle of the fourth quarter and the software sales team of Company X was trying to sell a $650K software monitoring solution to a major financial institution, Company Y. The customer IT executive had been convinced a few months earlier that the solution would help them tackle certain technical issues in serving their international accounts. The Company X sales team was getting pretty frustrated with a sale that should have been easy. They couldn’t get Company Y’s procurement team to move with urgency. Read more