Have you encountered yourself in a business meeting questioning how to lead the sales negotiation in the direction you desire without making everyone aware of this?

In this article, you will find 3 useful easy tips to achieve that goal with a smooth and easy conversation while avoiding bringing to the table aggressive tools. These are psychological tricks that are used in business and hostage negotiations.

1. Use Tags

This communication skill will help you uncover and identify temporary factors motivating the behavior of your counterpart implied by their words, actions, or attitudes.

We encourage you to hang a tag on any emotion, dynamic, or position that you detect. People love to feel understood by others in the challenges they face. If you are right or if you have misread them by using a tag it will make them show their true motivations.

For example, let’s say that you are explaining to one of your clients the benefits of acquiring disability insurance, and they seem reluctant to do it due to their incapability to see themselves in that situation. To get a better understanding of your client’s thoughts you could say “I know that is almost impossible to see yourself going through a puzzling situation like this.” If your assumption is correct, your client would discuss it. “Or if you are wrong, they would try to correct you, which means you will have the right information to answer their uncertainties and guide them to get disability insurance.

2. Evaluate Allegations

This negotiation technique helps you anticipate the negative reaction your client may have will have and, rather than refuting them, call each one out on the spot. Using this tool effectively removes mental or emotional roadblocks that could prevent you from progressing with your negotiation. It is also an excellent way to warm up before making a request or delivering bad news. In addition to that, the perspective of your counterpart changes, instead of seeing you as an opponent you become a part of their team.

For example, if you are about to say bad news regarding a difficult and time-consuming request the Insurance company has for your client, you might say this: I am about to make your life much harder. I am the bad news delivery guy and the insurance company has requested you to provide more explicit information, so we need you to help us complete “this questionnaire.”

3. Summarizing Conversations

This final but fundamental technique refers to creating a synopsis of the conversation, including things that your counterpart didn’t always explicitly mention. It is a mix of tagging and summarizing known facts as well as mentioning feelings that your counterpart has about them. A good summary will result in a “that’s right” moment.

Example

”We have been talking for the past hour about the benefits of acquiring disability insurance, you realize that it’s a smart move but you also think that this hardly would happen to you -making this a non-essential monthly cost.”

Your client most likely would answer “that’s right”, so now you have the chance to change their perspective now that they are on the same page by telling them a story about someone just like them that decided to decline getting coverage and regret it later on. ** Needs improvement.

Now that you have a better understanding of these three negotiation techniques, we encourage you to start using them, practice before your meetings and utiilize them.