We all have to hone our skills in the art of negotiation. We’ll need to learn how to negotiate so we can get good prices on our major purchases, be able to come up with business deals, find solutions with coworkers, and more. Negotiation is a part of life that you can’t ignore. Here are some great tips to help you with negotiation in your every-day life.

Be Willing to Negotiate – You have to be willing to negotiate for any good to come out of it. Don’t be too shy to talk about money and just accept whatever price that you’re offered on the outright. Most skilled negotiators will take advantage of someone who’s timid and make them pay full price. You have to want to negotiate so you can get a better deal. Sometimes you’ll get a better deal just by asking for one. When I was buying flowers for my fiancé, I asked if they had any sort of discounts I could get, and then I got 10% off just for asking!

Don’t Get Overcome by Emotions – A lot of negotiators who are not very experienced become way too involved in the situation emotionally, and make it all about winning, which gets them in trouble. They’ll shout, demand, and threaten to get there way. In order for a negotiation to be successful, both parties have to feel like they’re getting a good deal. Be calm, and willing to compromise a bit.

Don’t Follow the Rules – A lot of people will tell you that they’re not allowed to do something because of company policy, or because that’s the rules they were given. They’ll tell you that they can’t give you that good of a deal, or can’t change that in a contract. If you’re signing your name, you can change whatever you want to the contract, they can not accept if it they please, but that’s their prerogative. Don’t accept that you’re not allowed to do something because “it’s the rules.” If they tell you that company policy says otherwise, demand that to talk to someone who can change the company policy or bend the rules.

Don’t Name a Price First – Never be the first person in the negotiation to name a price. You want to know what they’re thinking well before you name a price. If you name a price first, you could easily be walking into a situation where you are giving the other person a fantastic deal, and you might not even know it! If they were expecting to pay you $500 for some work, and you offer to do it for $100, there’s no way they’re going to pay what they had originally intended. Instead ask what the budget is for the contract, this’ll make them name a price first.

Ask for more than you expect – After you get an offer, say things like “that’s not good enough, and “you’ll have to do better than that.” Don’t be mean or aggressive about it, just say it calmly, and you might get more than you expected. Even if you get a very good offer, you can ask for more than you want. This way your counterpart will feel like they’re lowering your expectations and making you give up a little even though you weren’t giving up anything at all.

Pretend it’s someone else’s decision – Before you finalize a negotiation, tell them that you’ll have to talk it over with the boss, or your supervisor before you can agree to something. This will do a couple of things for you. First, it’ll stop them from rushing you, since the decision isn’t “yours’ so they’ll have to give you some time to get things done, and second, it’ll encourage them to sweeten the deal. If they think it’s not up to you, even though you’re sold on the idea, they’ll have an incentive to sweeten the deal to make it more likely that the authority figure will accept the deal.

Don’t be too interested – If you give them the impression that you’re very interested in the deal. This will enable them to get a lot more out of you than you want to give, because they know you’ll agree to whatever they want, because you are very interested.

Don’t Let them Feel Cheated – If they feel cheated when the negotiation is done, they’ll never want to negotiate with you again. They also might not fulfill their part of the deal. You want to make them feel like they’re getting a decent deal, regardless of how good it actually is.
If you don’t know basic negotiation techniques, someone who does will out negotiate you and cause you to lose out on a lot of money!