CPSM Blog

Getting back to "negotiating"

Yesterday I had been working on a research paper and had the excuse for not continuing my study of negotiations. As I was relaxing watching Jay Leno I was hilariously put back on track when Jay commented in his monologue about somebody going in with a bullet-proof briefcase for negotiations. You need to be "less confrontational" in your negotiation style said Jay and reminded me of the negotiation philosophies in Task 1-A-2.These are Win-win or co operational, win-lose or adversarial/competitive and lose-lose or confrontational. The last being the one Jay Leno was alluding to last night!

An important point to note about negotiations is that when buyer-seller are negotiating there is a genuine desire on the buy side to move forward. Remember all the effort in going through the bidding process that the supply manager  has already gone through.

Preparing for negotiations is thus really important starting with analyzing SWOTT and Porter's five forces. Essentially this section is about how to make a deal work for both the buyer and seller and move the buyer's organization move forward ensuring that the seller is able to make a fair profit.

Negotiations has two subsections

I was quickly browsing the next two sections and interestingly these are related to negotiations. The first sections deals with preparing for negotiation (Task 1-A-2) and the section after is about negotiation tactics (1-A-3). Negotiations is a perennial topic in supply management,sales, international business  and multi-cultural situations and everyone is always interested in getting some skills or training in negotiations.

I found it interesting that it really is given two sub-sections in the broader contracting and negotiations section.More on this later...