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The Art of Persuasion and Negotiation – 3 Useful Tips to Get What You Want From People

The art of persuasion and negotiation is a much-coveted skill. For hundreds of years, humankind has been using these skills to survive. The ancient Greeks negotiated with their neighboring lands all the time. Leaders of different nations always send ambassadors to settle peace negotiations. Traders of both the old and the new world use their powers of persuasion to sweeten their deals.

If you look at today’s environment, the art of persuasion and negotiation has only become more relevant. The most successful people in the world know this all too well. By reading this article, you, too, can learn how to channel their powers of persuasion and negotiation.

1) Knowledge is power.

In the art of persuasion and negotiation, knowledge is very crucial. How much you know determines the extent of your power over the other. Before attempting a negotiation, you have to know everything there is to know about the people you’ll be speaking with.

Find out what their weaknesses are, what they want, how much they are willing to put out, etc. Knowing all these can help you come up with better points for arguments and negotiations. You’ll have an easier time persuading people to see things your way as well.

2) Establish common goals.

When dabbling in the art of persuasion and negotiation, you must remember that both parties should benefit from the deal. As much as possible, make the deal a win-win situation for everyone.

One way to cinch such collaborations is by establishing common goals – goals that are in line with you and your prospect’s plan. Doing this gives the client a sense of solidarity, which will make them more agreeable to whatever it is you’re cooking up.

3) Try the grassroots approach.

Gone are the days when you don’t care about the person you’re negotiating with over the phone. The grassroots strategy is once again earning popularity.

Instead of treating your clients like cash cows, try to develop a certain relationship with them. Ask about their family or their dreams every once in a while. The grassroots approach requires you to relate with the people you’re trying to persuade or negotiate with. Drop your high and mighty attitude and start knocking on doors.

The art of persuasion and negotiation has long been practiced. Anybody can try the different strategies one step at a time. Try it on your parents, your friends or the local shopkeepers in your town.

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Operating Room Fires – Increasingly Prevalent Problem Presents Potential For Product Innovation

Operating room fires, once thought to be rare, isolated incidents, apparently are more prevalent than previously realized. The nonprofit healthcare research organization ECRI Institute published a report suggesting that hundreds of fires occur during the roughly 50 million inpatient and outpatient procedures that take place annually, often resulting in serious injury or death. This is a significant increase from the 50-100 previously estimated by patient safety organizations.

Some medical groups say fires have increased over the past two decades with the increased use of lasers and tools employing electric current. The ECRI estimates that 44 percent of operating room fires occur during head, face, neck or chest surgery in which electrical surgical tools and lasers are too close to the oxygen the patients are breathing.

The current ideology is that the basic elements of fire – heat, fuel, and oxidizer – are always present during surgery, and only through training and instituting stricter guidelines can these horrible accidents be prevented. Unfortunately, few products exist that could lower the risk of operating room fires and explosions. This suggests that the market for such products presents a potentially lucrative opportunity for medical device and pharmaceutical companies to focus their research and development. A patent review similarly shows little activity in this area, again leading to the conclusion that opportunity awards imaginative innovators.

Fuel Is Abundant in the OR

Fuels commonly found in the operating theater include prepping agents like degreasers (ether, and acetone), aerosol adhesives, and tinctures such as hibitane, merthiolate, and duraprep. Other fuels include supplies: drapes, gowns, masks, hoods, caps, shoe covers, instrument and equipment drapes and covers, egg-crate mattresses, mattresses and pillows, blankets, gauze, sponges, dressings, ointments such as petroleum jelly, paraffin and white wax, flexible endoscopes, covering for fiber optic cables, gloves, stethoscope tubing, smoke evacuator hoses and other equipment/supplies used in the OR.

Oxidizers in the OR include oxygen enriched mixtures above 21 percent oxygen used to ensure proper oxygenation of the patient during anesthesia. Whenever the oxygen concentration is above 21 percent, an oxygen enriched atmosphere exists with the potential to feed fires. Oxygen is supplied via anesthesia devices, ventilators, wall outlets, or gas cylinders and all are potentially hazardous. Oxygen can also come from the thermal decomposition of nitrous oxide, which should also be considered an oxygen-enriched atmosphere. Materials such as drapes absorb oxygen and retain it for some time which makes them easier to ignite, causes them to burn faster and hotter, and makes them much harder to extinguish.

The Key Is Controlling Heat Sources

The introduction of lasers, electro-surgical tools and other exothermic surgical instruments has significantly increased the incidence and risk associated with operating theater fires. ECRI notes that the key to preventing fires involving surgical patients is controlling the OR’s various heat sources and preventing them from contacting fuels. Beyond that, however is the potential to reduce the chances materials will combust. Currently, the medical community is completely reliant on alcohol-based antiseptic products and surgical textiles that trap oxygen within their fibers. With the current surgical antiseptic industry alone worth over $500 million dollars, a company that can develop a fire-resistant alternative that offers the same antimicrobial protection found in traditional alcoholic based antiseptics could dominate this market and become an industry leader and innovator.

Just a Few Patents Recently Filed

However, few companies appear to be innovating in this area. Patenting activity, for example, suggests that medical device and pharmaceutical companies have not realized the opportunity that exists in technologies that could launch them as the new industry leaders. In fact, the few recent patents addressing preventative technology innovations are exclusively assigned to individual inventors.

One such patent, for example, describes a fire-resistant phosphate composition with antibacterial, antiviral and fungicidal properties that claims to be ecologically pure, non-toxic, non-carcinogenic and non-allergic. Another patent describes a surgical drape designed to prevent the buildup of trapped oxygen and thereby decrease the risk of fire. Yet another describes an oxygen sensor system that would sound an alarm if oxygen levels are unsafe.

The fact that these fires were significantly under-reported but are now gaining extensive media scrutiny increases the need for innovative companies to address minimizing these risks through their product development strategies. The lack of innovative patents indicates there is a potential to tap into a severely deficient market opportunity. Are you up for the challenge?

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Business Negotiation Strategy in Each Stage

Business negotiation strategy has a wide range. However, there are different strategies in each stage according to the practice.

2.3.1 The strategy of the first phase
a. Consensus-style
Apply: there is no business between the two sides before; their strength are close for the first contact.
Practice: he uses of diplomatic language, and chooses a neutral topic, with the attitude of respect for each other, neither overbearing nor servile.

b. Frank style
Apply: the two sides had business dealings before, and a better understanding of each other. Their relations are very good; and strength is less than the other negotiators.
Practice: he gives a sincere, passionate talk about the friendly and cooperative relations in the past, and frankly takes the views of one’s own statements as well as the expectations of each other; and frankly show one’s own weaknesses

c. Carefully opening ceremony
Apply: the negotiating parties have had business dealings over the past but the other side had not a satisfactory performance
Practice: he expresses regret that the inadequacies of the other party in the past and hope that they can change this situation through this cooperation. In no hurry to reduce the relationship, he uses of a courtesy question to check each other’s attitudes and thoughts.

d. Start-style attack
Apply: the other side is condescending, and has the tendency to force and do not respect one’s own side
Practice: he should be rational and advantage, and to hit the key issues and he can not be too aggressive, to change their practices in a right time.

2.3.2 The strategy of the pricing stage
First, prices starting point strategy

a. suspended construction of the high-profile (Continental quote)
It refers to a negotiation strategy that a seller makes a higher price than the actual requirements in the starting point and bargains with the opponent and makes concessions to reach an agreement.
Do: outcry hard; make concessions slowly
Methods to deal with: ask for basis of quotation or counter-offer.

b. throw the ball down (Japanese-style quotations)
It refers to a negotiation strategy that first of all the seller propose a lower starting point than actual requirements of its own for negotiations in order to attract each other, trying to beat the opponent who take part in the competition, and then take real negotiations with the buyer who be tempted to hook, force them to make concessions to reach their own purpose.
Methods to deal with: first, the buyers compare and calculate the contents of the bid of each other with other vendors’, and straightforward to raise objections. Second, he is not tempted by the small profit of the other side.
Second, division pricing strategy
Divisor is commodity prices and dividend is that quantity of goods or the use of time. It comes up with a very small price. So buyers feel price cheap and low.
Third, adder pricing strategy
In business negotiations, sometimes it is afraid that high prices offered will scare customers. The price had gradually broken down into several levels to make a number of quotations. And the final total is still equal to the original one-time price.
Fourth, differences in pricing
According to the nature of the customer, the number of purchase, trading hours, the payment ways, it adopts a different pricing strategy.
Fifth, Comparison Price
It refers to the other side point out quotations of similar commodity of many businesses which is beneficial for one’s own side to establish reference prices, and then make comparisons between these goods traded and similar goods of businesses in terms of performance, quality, service, and other transaction conditions, and as the basis of price for this side.
Sixth, the number traps
He shows their cost of production of goods to the buyer to support the reasonableness of the total price.
Apply situation: it is a multi-commodity trading, the complex cost, no uniform standard method of calculating the cost, or each other is very offensive to use the case.

2.3.3 The strategy in consultation phase
First, negotiation strategy under the conditions of the advantages
a. do not set a precedent
in the negotiations, it means a party who hold the advantage in order to adhere and raise their own terms of trade to use no precedent as reason for refusing to make concessions, let the other side to accept their conditions.
It is a good way to refuse the other party and do not injure the face of the other party.

b. the first bitter; after sweet
first in the negotiations use harsh conditions to cast doubt on the other side, depression of mind, etc., in order to significantly reduce the opponent’s expectations, and then gradually in the actual negotiations, make concessions step by step, to make each other’s psychology have been met and reach a agreement.

c. the price trap
It refers to the party use of market prices increased trends expected, as well as the widespread concerns psychological, to attract the other sides on the price to let them neglect other important provisions.

d. period strategy
It refers to business negotiations, a strong party put forward the time limit to reach an agreement. Over this period, sponsors will withdraw from the negotiations, as to put pressure on the other side to make a decision as soon as possible.

e. diversionary
In order to achieve a particular purpose and needs, one’s own side consciously direct the subject of consultations to irrelevant false momentum, transfer their attention in order to realize their goals

f. the head start
In the start of the negotiations through the use of one’s own strengths and characteristics, in order to seize the psychological advantage, and he seizes the initiative.

Second, negotiation strategy under the conditions of the disadvantages
a. fault-finding
In Business negotiations, in response to each other’s products or related issues, he over and over again deliberately finds problems and the other side’s confidence will drop, and so to make concessions.
The key point is that critical issues should be raised rightly.

b. take a soft approach to meet the other’s hard attitude
When there is a crisis situation in the negotiations or the other side does not make concessions, and he can take a soft approach to meet each other’s hard attitude to avoid facing conflict, so as to achieve the purpose.
The main points: the use of indirect tactics, insisted reasoning

c. woolly-headed
It is defensive strategy is that in the event of adverse situations, pretending to confuse, and use it as cover to paralysis of the will to fight each other in order to achieve the purpose and muddle through.

d. tired tactics
It refers to the negotiations like the marathon, and gradually wear down the opponent’s spirit, to fatigue, to reverse the own side’s disadvantage and passive of the situation, when the opponent exhausted, dizziness brain up, the party may be anti – from defensive to offensive, with the attitude of reasoning, put the views of this side to reduce the other side to accept the conditions.

e. power is limited
It refers to business negotiations, the weaker party was asked to make excessive concessions on certain conditions to the other side. They claim that the mandate on this issue is limited, and have no right to make such a concession to the other party, or established fact can not be changed in order to make the other side give up conditions. f. turn around telling. It refers to the party at a disadvantage, let the other side to pay more for the negotiations, so that they change from passive to active, to turn disadvantage to advantage.

Third, negotiation strategy under the conditions of the balance of power
a. testing the waters
The negotiators intended to propose a number of assumptions, through the other side responses and answers to detect the other side’s intentions and seize the good opportunity to make a deal.

b. first rally; after counter
It refers to after the other side make offer, in no hurry to make a counter-offer, but point out that changes in market situation, or to emphasize the strength and advantages to build the situation in favor of the own side, and then raised prices.
Response: refused, adhering to offer, make a concession carefully

c. first “vertical” post “capture”
It refers to although the party would like to make a deal, but put on a nonchalant way, cover up their eagerness, it seems merely to satisfy the needs of the other party for the negotiations, so that the other side is eager to take the initiative to make concessions.

d. put on foolish, but clever in fact
It refers to a party put on deliberately confused, frightened, hesitant, slow response in order to let the other side down, for sufficient time to achieve the purpose.

e. for the cursory
It refers to the party at the negotiating table, encounters the key issues, or there are insurmountable differences between each other, or to remedy its own mistakes, make an excuse for their own that the decision can not be done by them, to further negotiations by another.

f. fish in troubled waters
It means in the negotiations, he deliberately disturb the normal order, and put many of the problems out once, making it difficult to meet in order to let the other side make mistakes.

g. private contacts
It means through the personal contacts, using a variety of ways to enhance understanding and emotional contact, the establishment of friendship, he can use this way to promote the negotiation.
There are many forms of private exchanges, such as telephone contact, visits, entertainment, and dinner and so on.

h. lubrication strategy
It refers to the negotiators in order to express the feelings of friendship to feed gifts for each other, for a better effect of negotiation, the West humorously referred to it as “lubrication strategy.”
To consider: cultural differences, the value of gifts, gift-giving occasions and rituals.

i. emotional transfer
It refers to when the formal negotiations have difficult impasse or obstacles, the organizers of the negotiations should be conscious to transfer the environment of the negotiations, the atmosphere and forms, so that the other side’s emotion transfer

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