Understanding the Opposition

The most common mistake made by folks who are getting ready to negotiate is failing to learn all they can about the person with whom they are negotiating. You may be negotiating with the largest corporation in the world, but you’ll be in a room (or on the phone or on the Internet) with an individual representative of that corporation. Find out all you can about that person.

Obviously, you want to know the name and title of that person. If you will be negotiating with more than one person, you’ll want to know the names and titles of everyone on the team. You can easily find out the negotiator’s name just by asking him or her, if no one has bothered to tell you. Usually, you will be handed a card. If not, I also say something like, “I want to put all your information in my address book. What is your correct title?” And from the negotiator’s name and title, you can tell a lot. For example:

• Position: A person’s title usually tells you a lot about where the person stands in the organization’s pecking order.
• Lifestyle: A person’s name, which you can look up in a number of sources, including your local phone book, can lead you to personal information, such as the
• Neighborhood the person lives in
• Church the person may attend
• Schools the person’s children attend
• Areas where the person may shop

These details can give you insights into the individual and certainly something to talk about — which doesn’t obligate you to talk about them. When you find out about sensitive material, exercise discretion. The exception would be if you discovered something which, if true, would cause you to pull out of the deal. In that case, you would want to clear the matter up early and discreetly, rather than waste a lot of time with someone with whom you aren’t going to do business anyway.

The amount of time and energy you put into this kind of preparation reflects how important the negotiation is to you. Or to the other side. If you find out that the person you’re negotiating with is the president of the company, you know right away that this negotiation is important to the other side, so you may be inclined to take it more seriously. Perhaps the president is looking you over for other business, or the ramifications of the deal are greater than you had initially thought.
But much more important than what you discover from the name and title, you want to know a few other things:

• What is the negotiator’s authority?
• Who is his or her client?
• What interests are driving this negotiation for the other side?

These are three key questions that you need to answer in order to know about the person who will be sitting across the negotiating table from you. Answering these questions is an essential step to success in the negotiation. Negotiators who fail to ask these questions are so common that, when you pursue the answers yourself, you will not only be more successful in the negotiation, but you will often leave the negotiation having made yourself a friend of the negotiator sitting on the other side of the table.