The photo from our workshop, The Art of Negotiating, at the Badalona Chamber of Commerce, has made me reflect on negotiation: Each person enters a negotiation with their own objectives, interests, needs, and priorities.
And that's where the real challenge begins.
Because A negotiation isn't about sitting down with the other person and starting to talk. Negotiation begins much earlier.
🎯 El antes de la negociación es decisivo
Before entering a negotiation meeting, we need to do our own research and come prepared.
🔎 Obtain as much information as possible about the other party, their company, their situation and the context in which the negotiation takes place.
🧩 Knowing their interests: What does he really want to achieve? What's behind his initial position?
💡 Determine your needs and priorities: What is essential for her? What can be secondary? Where can she have leeway?
📌 Identify your preferred interests: Not everything has the same value for the other party. Knowing which elements are truly important helps us find potential points of agreement.
🎭 Understand their negotiation style: Is he more competitive? Collaborative? Avoidant?… Understanding how he approaches a negotiation allows us to prepare better.
📩 Y hasta un detalle aparentemente pequeño puede aportar información: How did you write to us?
The tone of their email, the words they use, what they highlight, what they insist on or what they don't mention... all of this can offer us clues about their priorities and expectations for our negotiation.
📚 Cuanta más información tengamos before the meeting, This will allow us to better define our objectives, our alternatives, our concessions, and our strategy.
🤝 Y entonces llega una segunda idea fundamental:
The other party in the negotiation is not our adversary. They are part of the team.
Although we may initially be looking in different directions, we can build a shared direction.
In a negotiation there may be two or three parties with different interests, but the goal should not simply be for one to win and the other to lose.
The real value lies in reaching agreements win-win, in which both parties consider that the result obtained is worthwhile.
Because a negotiation shouldn't be framed solely as: “What can I achieve?”
But also as: “What can we build together?”
And that completely changes the perspective.
When we seek a sustainable agreement, we are thinking beyond the immediate outcome:
➡️ En mantener la relación
➡️ En generar confianza
➡️ En fidelizar
➡️ En abrir nuevas oportunidades
➡️ En seguir colaborando en el futuro
The agreement is the starting point, not the end point.
We want to finalize a negotiation and be able to think:
“Today we have found a path that allows us to continue walking together tomorrow.” 🚶♀️
Because Negotiating well doesn't mean imposing your will. It means understanding, building, and finding an agreement that allows both parties to move forward together.
🙏 💜 Thank you to all the students in Badalona today.
You have been incredibly active: many questions, many examples and, above all, many real-life situations from your daily professional lives.
And that's how we built the workshop together, by negotiating!.😉
Now I propose to you:
👉 How do you prepare for your negotiations? Do you plan or improvise? Do you know your counterparts?
Different interests. Different perspectives. One common path. 🤝
#Negotiation #Communication #ActiveListening #WinWin #Leadership #SoftSkills #Customer Loyalty #Collaboration #Training
