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Anubhav Raina shares one post in a series of three that identifies key tactics to improve your organisation’s ability to negotiate and influence negotiations.

If you have a good idea about your counterparty’s personal narrative & a good sense of how you could expand the pie for yourself, it’s time to work through the actual proposal at hand.

A proposal will always consist of an “ask” (what the counterparty’s is being asked to do) and a “reward” (what the counterparty will receive in return).

It’s shocking how many conversations result in a stalemate because of the flawed assumption that all parties understand & agree on the reward & ask.

More often than not, there is no clearly articulated reward and/or ask. This is because people are so caught up in their own emotional needs that they focus only on their ask. Not the reward being promised — which is just as important in a deal.

If there is no reward being promised at all — do you expect the deal to work out?

The good news is that getting over this hurdle is simple. Take a piece of paper and articulate what the reward and ask is from the perspective of your counterpart.

But there are two rules to follow for rewards:

1. Rewards should line up with the receiver’s conscious narrative (not yours)

Most of us have a tendency to make the default assumption that others think like us — I suspect it’s because we spend so much time in the echo-chamber of our own mind.

Even in instances where you may have thought through rewards, it is easy to mistakenly believe that your concept of a reward also matches your counterpart’s.

This doesn’t always work out because…surprise surprise…your counterpart is not you.

They have their own agenda (their conscious narrative). For them to be interested in working out a deal, the reward should match their narrative — not yours.

If you’ve questioned them effectively & spent time building emotional resonance, you should also have understood them well. Now it’s time to use your knowledge of their conscious narrative to construct a better reward.

Key points include:

• Negotiation: sweetening the deal
• Using biases to your advantage
• Negotiation: When to walk away

Read the full article, Appendix C: Sweetening the deal, on Medium.com.