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What are the best negotiation tools and techniques? What dodge-and-counterpunch negotiation moves should you use?
When negotiating with a partner who’s throwing everything at you, you need to be prepared for their moves. Additionally, you should consider what type of boundaries and conditions you want to set for the negotiation.
Discover more about these necessary negotiation tools and techniques below.
Know Your Moves (and Your Counterpart’s)
Never Split the Difference cautions that to prepare for a negotiation, you need to plan some specific dodge-and-counterpunch moves to use—especially when you’re going up against a seasoned negotiator who has good negotiation tools and techniques.
Dodging Tactics
These are what you do to deflect your counterpart’s “punches”—aggressive threats, demands, and deadlines they may throw at you to pressure you into making a deal on their terms. You can use open-ended questions to say “no” without actually using the word, or pivot to non-monetary terms. Say things like, “Let’s put price aside for now. What else can you offer that would make this a good deal for me?”
Strategic Umbrage
You need to be prepared to hit back without getting angry. Voss champions a technique psychologists call “strategic umbrage.” This means being genuinely angry (not faking it), but in control of your emotions. The key to strategic umbrage is getting angry at the offer being made—not the person making it. Saying, “I’m afraid there are no circumstances that would make that proposal work for me” in a displeased—but measured—tone is a good way to leverage a little bit of anger to your advantage.
Nonstrategic umbrage would mean letting your angry emotions completely dictate your negotiating posture in a way that’s counterproductive. In practice, this would involve losing your cool and making personal attacks against your counterpart by saying things like, “If you think I’d even consider that pathetic excuse of an offer, either you’re an idiot or you think I am.”
Determine Your Boundaries for the Negotiation
Negotiation experts write that there are a few tools you can use to determine your boundaries for the negotiation—specifically, when you’d walk away from a negotiation, your minimum conditions for a deal, and the range of outcomes that would be acceptable to both you and your counterpart.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Master Guides: Negotiation summary:
- How we're always negotiating, even if we don't realize it
- A synthesis of ideas and recommendations from leading negotiation experts
- A look into two different approaches to negotiation: emotional and rational
