Negotiating Tip #35:
Adding Value is Often the Key
When haggling with a firm with which you may never again do business, what matters most is getting leverage. That changes when your side is going to be in a long-term relationship with another company. Now, the issue is how to work together to create more value for both – what we call “value mapping.”
In such situations, there are often opportunities to build a much better deal, one that can bring greater value to both parties, but they go begging all the time. MCN sets up practice negotiations where there are lot of subtle opportunities for adding value to the deal, and yet few people pursue them.
To be sure, creative deal-making complicates negotiations: it takes more time and requires that people put a lot more energy into the negotiation. So the tendency is to settle the negotiation the simplest way possible – by haggling over price and a few other items.
But deal-making is the mode modern business is racing into now. The main reason is that the demands on negotiators are becoming more severe, as our global economy becomes increasingly competitive.