How to plan a negotiation place?

If your company is building a new space, get involved in planning the room where most of the negotiating occurs. Fight hard to make it the right size, near the restrooms, and near some areas that can be used for break-out sessions. Everyone has a tendency — during these days when money is hemorrhaging all over the place — to cut back on the negotiating space because “we don’t use it that much” or “we can make do with less.”

All this is true. However, if you consider how important selling is to your company, or negotiating major deals to your law firm, or closing a transaction to your bank or real estate business, you cannot overrate the value of this space. This location is where you really make money. It is where the deals are made that are at the heart of your business. Don’t “do with less” in your negotiating space unless you are willing to “do with less” in your negotiation. Scale down offices if you have to, but don’t scale down your negotiation space.

The next time your company designs new office space, look around at great negotiating spaces. You don’t need a huge budget, but you do need to keep in mind some basic needs. A good negotiating space is more than a huge conference table with marble top. In fact, the marble top can be a bit formal for most negotiations. In my law office, we have break-out rooms nearby, great cross ventilation, and a work station that can be turned toward the conference area. Everything is at our fingertips. The area was designed by Marni Belsome, who took into consideration these tips about good negotiating space.

How seating affect your negotiation?

Seating arrangements may seem like a silly subject to you if you’ve never thought about it before. Sometimes the importance of seating can be overemphasized — but not often. Definitely do not leave seating to chance, in spite of the number of people who seem willing to do so. Where you sit during a negotiation can have a big impact on how well you function during a negotiation.
Here are some seating tips:

• Sit next to the person with whom you need to consult quickly and privately. This person is your confidant. You don’t want that person sitting across the table and off-center, where you will need to use hand signals and glances to communicate.
• Sit opposite the person with whom you have the most conflict. For example, if you are the leader of your negotiating team, sit opposite the leader of the other negotiating team. If you want to soften the confrontational effect, you can be off-center by a chair or two. If the shape of the table or room gives you the opportunity to be on an adjacent, rather than opposite, side to your opponent, you can lessen the confrontational approach.
• Consider who should be closest to the door and who should be closest to the phone. If you expect to use a speaker phone or to have people huddling outside the negotiating room, these positions can be positions of power. The person nearest the phone generally controls its use. The person nearest the door can control physical access to the room.
• Windows and the angle of the sun are important considerations, especially if the situation generates heat or glare. Again, stay within your comfort zone. If the room feels physically uncomfortable, kindly suggest a different room. Now about the negotiation of prime interest to most readers: asking for a raise. Usually that conversation takes place in your boss’s office. Avoid the seat where you normally sit to receive assignments. If your boss has a conversation area, try to move there for the discussion about your raise. Sofas are the great equalizers. If your boss is firmly planted behind the desk, do two things:
• Stay standing for a beat or two at the beginning of your presentation, but not after you are invited to sit down. Speaking on your feet is a display of uncompromised self-confidence.
• When you sit down, move your chair to the side of the desk — or at least out of its regular position. You want to make the statement that this is a different conversation than the normal routine of your boss assigning you a task.

Try to avoid being lower than your boss when you talk about your compensation. Whenever you can, try be on the same eye level with the person you are negotiating with, even if you normally take direction from that person.

How to handle negotiation on your home turf?

Your own office often provides a powerful advantage because it is your home turf. It’s your operational base. You have all the information needed at your hands. You have a support staff, should you need their expertise or assistance. Your comfort level is going to be at its highest in that environment. The home turf is so important to the Grundig Pump Company of Fresno, California, that it built a series of guestrooms right at its factory and hired a staff to look after visitors. You can see the plant, negotiate the deal, and never worry about accommodations, meals, or anything else while you are in town. Grundig set up an ideal negotiating environment. The visitor is freed from the shackles of travel arrangements and home office interruptions. This setup represents the epitome of the oft-stated rule “always negotiate on your home turf.”

Beware! Negotiating on your home turf is not always best. Often you are better off in the other person’s office. The more time you spend on the other skills covered in this blog, the less important it is whether you are in your office or someone else’s. Sometimes meeting in the other party’s office is actually better for you. If your opponent in a negotiation always claims to be missing some document back at the office, meeting there could avoid that particular evasion. Sometimes bulky, hard-to-transport documents are critical to a negotiation. In that event, the best site for negotiation is wherever those documents happen to be.

Visiting the other person’s office always gives you a lot of information about that person. A quick glance around the office tells you a lot about the person’s interests, usually something about his family situation, whether she is neat or messy, what his taste is in furnishings, and often, just how busy she really is. You usually can tell something about the person’s place in the pecking order of the business. Is her office close to the more-powerful people in the organization or a fur piece away? How much of the coveted window space does he have?

The information you glean from visiting the other person’s office allows you to know the person better. And the better you know and understand the other person, the easier it is for you to relate to them. You can never know too much about the person you are facing in a negotiation. The most important consideration is to be in a place, physically and mentally, where you can listen. Be emphatic on this issue — both for your sake and for the sake of the person with whom you negotiate. If you cannot concentrate on what the other person is saying, you cannot negotiate. It’s impossible.