Positional Negotiations – Change your approach to improve your results

Anchor the discussion. Take a power position. Dig in your heels. Get the best deal possible by holding your ground.

Walking into your negotiation with this single-focus and stubborn mindset may make you feel powerful…but ultimately taking a positional approach is self-defeating.

After years of participating in negotiations for years, nothing sends the message of lack of confidence and being an amateur like a counterpart who is coming in with this approach.

Do you tend to rely on positional negotiating? Here’s how to shift your style towards one that will reap bigger rewards.

Change your mindset

Move your framing of the discussion from ‘negotiating against’ to ‘negotiating with’ in order to increase the collaborative nature of your discussions. Negotiations are not a battle, and you’re not out to ‘get’ or ‘beat’ your ‘opponent’.  Trust me, it’s hard to be positional when your mindset is one of finding solutions that work for both of you.

Examine motivations and justifications

If you can support what you’re asking your counterpart for, you’re moving away from a blind positional approach. Often, when we start a negotiation being positional, our basis for making an offer is simply to give us the most runway possible between your starting point and where you think the bargaining will land you. Being able to support even your most aggressive offers with rational justification will let your counterpart know that this isn’t a game.

Facing a counterpart relying on positional techniques? Here’s how to change the path your discussions are on.

Call it out

Being bold and calling your counterpart out on their positional technique will burst their bubble of perceived power. You don’t have to be aggressive in this (after all, you’re trying to work together – not create barriers) and sometimes all it takes is an acknowledgment of what they’re trying to do. It’ll be rare that your counterpart will stay the course with their positional approach – but if they do, start leading by example by…

Discuss values

Purposely shifting a conversation to non-quantitative topics in order to build the rapport and trust needed for collaboration. Achieve success with other negotiation topics, set a tone of using your values and rational justifications for achieving those agreements and then move back to the more difficult/positional topics. It will be hard for your counterpart to stand their positional ground once you’ve shared wins with a more elegant style of negotiation.

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Have you ever been in a positional negotiation? How did it work out for you? Which technique above has worked for you?