The power of time in a sales negotiation
When I work with clients to improve their negotiation skills, one of the first things we do is sit down and review their past experiences in negotiation situations. This usually produces a list of good and bad experiences. The reason I take the time to do this is because it shows me where things have gone wrong in the past and where my clients need to spend more time developing their negotiation skills.
Time and time again, the same weakness appears in my clients. No matter how confident you feel about a negotiation or how much research you’ve done beforehand, the issue of time available seems to trip you up time and time again.
How the Japanese used time to their advantage
In the early 1980s, American companies “rediscovered” Japan, and almost every company wanted to make a deal with a Japanese company to gain access to high-quality, low-cost products. What this meant is that many US businessmen (and women) took planes and flew to Japan to negotiate some sales.
It quickly became apparent that the Japanese were excellent negotiators. Americans were coming home with signed trade agreements that were fine, but nothing like what they originally expected.
It turns out that the Japanese were not only good negotiators, but also knew how to read an airline’s flight schedule. The Japanese would find out when the Americans were scheduled to fly home and would hold off on negotiations until it got closer to the time for the Americans to leave for the airport.
The Americans would be desperate to get a deal done and would end up giving away too much just to get their flight done. After this had been going on for a while, an American took the time to step back and study how the negotiations with the Japanese were going. He quickly figured out what they were doing and how they were doing it.
The next time he was scheduled to negotiate in Japan with the Japanese, he found out when the Japanese he would be negotiating with were scheduled to take the train home. He went ahead and made two flight reservations, one before the train left and one after. Once the negotiations began, he stalled and the Japanese couldn’t understand why he didn’t care about missing his flight. Having missed the window to leave his flight negotiations, he began to take the negotiation seriously. Now it was time for the Japanese to start getting nervous: they were worried about missing their train back to Tokyo. In the end, they ended up making too many concessions.
Seven ideas to build your time power
One of the fundamental lessons that I include in all of my training sessions with my clients is that time is of the essence when it comes to negotiating power. It all comes down to one simple rule: the more time I have and the less time you have, the more bargaining power I have.
Now, of course, the key to making sure you have more time during a negotiation is to take steps to make sure you have the time you need. Here are seven ways you can make sure you’ll have the time you need:
- Allow time to shop around – you may be negotiating with the wrong people sitting across the table. You may decide to find someone else to make a deal with. If this happens, it will take some time and therefore you will need to give yourself enough time to do that search.
- Be on time for the meeting: This seems silly, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t. If you are late for a negotiation, you will be delayed throughout the entire discussion. Arriving on time will help you start off in a relaxed way.
- Give yourself time to think: Don’t let the other party push you into a decision that might be the wrong decision for you. Instead, ask for regular breaks and take some time to think in order to reassess where things are and what your next steps should be.
- Avoid marathon talks: death marches will only end up killing you. No matter how “cool” it might be to tell your boss that you were in negotiations for 8, 10, 12 hours straight, the sad reality is that his performance diminishes over time. The only exception to this rule is if you are happy with the current state of affairs and want to go all the way to get things done.
- Choose the best time to trade – They always say that there is a time for everything and trading is no exception to this rule. Are you a morning person or an afternoon person? Know your preference and schedule your trading sessions accordingly.
- Leave time for things to go wrong. This one is huge. Things will never go according to your plan. You should anticipate that things will happen that you could never have counted on, points that you thought both sides agreed to before discussions began will become major issues, etc. Leave time to work out all these things.
- Allow plenty of time to plan. Very often, my clients will think that planning is something that is only done before starting a negotiation. It turns out that you do it before, but you also do it during the negotiation to adjust to the events that unfold during the negotiation.
- Allow enough time to negotiate with your second option: If things don’t go your way with the other side of the table, make sure you have enough time to negotiate with another partner. There is no worse feeling than knowing that you have to stay with a bad negotiation because you have no other alternatives.
final thoughts
Too often, time starts causing you to make hasty decisions because you have a real or imagined deadline looming. When that happens, stop, take a deep breath, and then ask yourself the following three questions to find ways to ease the pressure of that deadline:
- What self-imposed or organization-imposed deadlines am I in?
- Are the deadlines I’m in real?
- What deadlines are putting pressure on the other side?
One of the most important points to remember about timing and deadlines in a negotiation is that you may not be the only one under pressure, the other party may be under more pressure than you are.
If you can learn to make time work for you during your next negotiation, then you’ll be able to close better deals and close them faster.
