Negotiation Stage 3: Exploring Needs and Wants

This phase is to:

Determine the relative priority of the others’ needs, wants, and success criteria.

The concept underpinning this phase is that what you might regard as of little or no value, could be vital to the other party. So, unless you ‘explore’ effectively, you might ‘give it away’, when they would be prepared to exchange something substantial in return. A good negotiator will ‘trade’ everything – nothing is given without an exchange.

And to introduce it ensure that all the parties clearly understand that this is an exploration only and not offering an agreement.

And, as before, if collaborative, you need to reveal your relative priorities.

We use another type of question in this phase – conditional or what if questions. For example: ‘What if you paid 30 days earlier than usual and in return we were to give you a 10% discount – how would that appeal to you?

This question should identify which is more important to the other party – price or cash flow?

By constantly exploring different combinations, the others’ priorities should be established. (This is true even if the parties haven’t worked out their priorities in advance.)

Some words/expressions you might use include: ‘possibly, perhaps, supposing, how about…, just an idea/suggestion, in theory…, without committing ourselves…

Once this stage is complete, call a time-out to assess all the gathered information and consider what might be the best possible outcome of the negotiation.