Believe it or not, you are a negotiator. Everyone negotiates something every day. Sometimes we negotiate with ourselves on different positions or sometimes we negotiate with others in order to gain the position. People negotiate even when they don’t think themselves as doing so. Negotiation is a basic means of getting what you want from others. Everyone wants to participate in decision making activity; fewer accept the decision dictated by someone else. Its not only in personal life that we reach to a decision through negotiation, this happens at every juncture whether government, business or family.
Although negotiation happens every day but it is not so easy. Sometimes people use strategies to negotiate that leave people worn out, dissatisfied or alienated and frequently all three. Now when I say that we are involved in negotiation in some way or other, which means we are selling something by which we want to gain position. And thus it is a sales process. Precisely, I am writing this article for the students who are all set to join corporate soon. But this can also be used in day to day life and in the long run. There is always a gap between campus and corporate which needs to be bridged anyhow. This gap can either be bridged by the faculties or students or corporate. If faculties or students are doing the job, we call it lead generation. This means you are trying to create the opportunity in suspect. There are several ways by which you can do so; Cold and Hot Calls, Marketing and promotional campaigns to name a few. I am not driving in to details of the ways. But ideally, initiation of the lead generation process should come from students because the sooner they learn, the better they will fit in to corporate. The third situation is when the prospect walks to you for solutions, this is fairly easy. This means opportunity is knocking your door. And we call it a qualified lead.
Now once the suspect is identified and converted in to prospect, the real sales process starts. In corporate we propose solution that fit in to customer business, we gather requirements, do gap fit analysis, design the solution, design the prototype and show the demo. Then we do negotiations over price, resources, deadlines and budgets. And finally the deal is in pocket. Mind you this is not the end, now the project has to start, resources have to be deployed, finish in deadlines so that we can generate more business from the same prospect. We call it farming activity. Thus it is a long process.
Sorry to take you on a long drive, but this will help you to win. Let me tell you how you can convert a suspect in to a prospect. You need to be smart enough (which you are already) to do that. Do the research about the business of your suspect, understand the business cycle operations, how they reach the margin and strategies followed by them. Try to gather the information from various sources about the current news and events. By doing so you have almost prepared yourself to be the part of the company. Trust me, you now understand where you need to create the opportunity in suspect to turn in to a prospect. Rest the prospect is yours, use it the way you want it.
If the prospect is walking to you which is fairly a simple case, he will walk to you with requirements. Your job is now comparably simple as you already know the requirements and you can propose the solution. Customers are always smarter than sellers, they know what they want, if you don’t provide them, they will walk away. For this you need to be empathic, put yourself in to your customer shoes. Try to understand the requirements thoroughly. Do the iterative research of the business which your customer is in to. You will get the clear picture what you need to propose. To be very simple and frank prepare yourself to get placed.
Now you are ready to join onboard. The negotiation starts on the other side of the table in two ways. First is the testing of your domain knowledge which you have gathered by understanding business. Second are your etiquettes to drive the business in a professional and ethical manner. Be cautious while you are in to negotiation mode. Negotiation are of two types hard and soft. The third one is both hard and soft. This is called principled negotiation developed at Harvard Negotiation Project. Thus you need to be both hard and soft at the same time, hard internally and soft externally.
It is important to develop the professional attitude and etiquettes before you are set to join. Remember the following, Separate the people from problem; Focus on interests not positions; Invent options for mutual gain; Insist on using objective criteria. I am writing in crisp but you can always discuss with me in detail.
Vaibhav Sharma
