Can negotiation demotivate your team?

Negotiations can suck the energy out of your people!

Whether you are in charge of a sales or purchasing team, you have certainly had to mobilise your people to enter into negotiations with internal and external business partners. Very often, people combine in-kind negotiations with stressful situations and conflicts of interest. These two factors, stress and conflict, can paralyse your team and move them away from achieving their business goals.

What impact this can have on your performance if you are managing a buying team:

buyers may stop at collecting three bids and choose the cheapest one without making any attempt at negotiating-people may hide behind computer screens and e-tendering tools, which can ruin business relationships with key suppliers, frustrate stakeholders and open up a gateway for suppliers to use back door sales techniquesdemands and fear can demotivate merchants to be creative and seek new opportunities for savings

What impact can this have on your performance if you are managing a sales team:

Key Account Managers (KAMs) may try to avoid meetings with client purchasing representatives, losing the opportunity to learn about buyers' purchasing strategiesvendors may prefer to make offers with maximum discounts, which can have a significant impact on the company's profitability lack of negotiation can lead to lower cooperation satisfaction on both sides of the table

What else can demotivate your team?

The business environment in which we operate is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. Aerospace, engineering, automotive have always operated in such conditions. Similar is happening in an increasing number of industries. Relationships with suppliers, or customers, are becoming multidimensional and multifaceted. Communication takes place multi-channel, simultaneously. Nowadays, negotiations in kind are team negotiations. Your employees prepare for them within interdisciplinary teams, often set up just for a specific project. It becomes crucial to ensure that team members have similar levels of negotiation skills. If there is too much variation in the level of competence, the negotiation team will function poorly and the work will take disproportionate time in relation to the results.

Without good collaboration, team negotiations can look chaotic and have a devastating effect on team morale:

• team members may interrupt each other. This can make it difficult for the other party to understand the offers being made
• Preparation for negotiations can be too time-consuming. This may be perceived by celebrities as a waste of time
• dynamic, proactive team members may tend to compete internally, to lack understanding of roles and responsibilities during team negotiations

Focus on preparation to improve team motivation

A group of well-prepared amateurs will usually beat an unprepared professional.

In-kind negotiations in business most often require teamwork. At the earliest opportunity, analyse how your buyers or sellers prepare for negotiations. It is an affliction of human nature that, as we get older and gain experience, we rely more and more on „internal autopilot” and schemes that are convenient for our brains. For many buyers, sellers, this means no preparation, no development of negotiation scenarios! They rely on their techniques, tricks, methods of influence and play out their theatre. But are they really getting optimum results?

The Harvard model of negotiation involves collaboration. Preparations for negotiations should include at least the following steps:

Remember

The 95% of success is a solid preparation, and the 5% is the very negotiations

A professional negotiator is always prepared, and has a negotiation script, for every conversation with a business partner. The importance the boss places on preparation has a huge impact on the motivation of the team. Team preparation and team negotiation is a very effective method of sharing knowledge and skills. You need one consistent method, which can be Negotiation Compass ® Eveneum.