Negotiating Tip #6:
People Like Me – So Why Is Negotiating Hard?
You might think that such people would make the best business negotiators. Not necessarily so! In fact, some very sociable people with huge numbers of friends are terrible business negotiators. To understand why, let’s review what skills are needed to make friends and what skills are needed to do well in business negotiating.
To make friends and get along with other people, we need to be nice, friendly, sincere, and avoid making waves. When you get into a social interaction, these kick in pretty much automatically. Some people are very good at applying those skills, and so they make friends easily.
Now let’s review the tactics needed to haggle better: make an offer so low it surprises the other side, being stingy, expressing shock when the other side won’t accept your low offer, refusing to split the difference, walking out from the talks.
See a problem here? Those two don’t exactly match up. That’s why we at Mobus Creative Negotiating teach you to understands that our mental model from the social world is not aligned with what it takes to haggle.
To be sure, haggling is the lowest form of negotiating. For doing more complex deals, we need to get along with the other side, so we need to use some of those social skills. But even if we are in a long-term relationship with another party, we always have to be watching out for our side’s interests. The business world is not social life: we are out to make money, not to make friends.