In our recent rounds of negotiation consulting for our Clients' year-end transactions, we saw one practice from a US-based sales executive that we admire greatly (both the practice and the executive).  You can use it, and if you are as successful as she is, you'll be happy. It's called the "Summary On A Page" (SOAP). Maybe she got it from her children's 6th grade English class, but a good idea is a good idea regardless of the source. For some reason, when we described this in Spain, our client there called it a SOAP. Maybe everyone knows this practice (although no one we discussed it with seemed to), or maybe this is an interesting case of cross-language acronym usage.  So SOAP it is. If you recall our recent article "Procurement Gets a Ferrari", you know that many buyers come in with…

K&R does a lot of work near year-end.  In addition to delivering Negotiation Skills Workshops, we directly consult on sales that are projected (or sometimes just hoped) to close before December 31st. Having had many of these discussions lately, one thing struck me as a pervasive problem.  Many sellers who consulted with us said something like this: “Procurement told me that they need to reduce costs with us to 10% below last year’s spend.  I have a plan to do it, and with that plan I think I can close this deal by year end.”  To me, this is Procurement asking for a Ferrari (or for any other very hard to obtain item).  Let’s talk about why. Let’s recall the K&R Negotiation Success RangeTM.  The NSRTM is a tool for analyzing the range in which both parties can succeed…

In a previous article we discussed Negotiation Leverage in the long-running, but recently settled Qualcomm/Nokia patent dispute.  Setting leverage aside, let's look at just one of the reported terms of that agreement as an illustration of one of K&R's Six Principles of Negotiation. The principle is this: "Terms Cost Money, Someone Pays the Tab (expense)." What the principle means is that as you negotiate, you should consider that every term in the final agreement will cost one side or the other money.  You should therefore be careful when altering your terms.  Mistakes can be expensive. This does not mean, however, that the cost to each party is the same. First example: in the Qualcomm/Nokia case, the agreement included an up-front payment and then per-unit royalties from…