By E-Myth Business Coach

One of the essential skills for any entrepreneur is negotiation. How well you can negotiate a favorable agreement or deal for your business can often spell the difference between failure and success. Negotiation can occur between you and your employees, your vendors, your customers, or even your investors. Despite the possible sense of intimidation or distaste many business owners might have around negotiating, it is a productive skill that will enable you to build your business in positive ways — and it does not have to be approached as an adversarial tactic to be endured!

What’s Your Price?

One of the fundamental keys to successful negotiation is to be certain of what you want to achieve and what you are willing to settle for. In their 1981 bestseller, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Without Giving In, Roger Fisher and William Ury state,

The reason you negotiate is to produce something better than the results you can obtain without negotiating. What are those results? What is that alternative? What is your BATNA — your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement? That is the standard against which any proposed agreement should be measured.

The other key is to know, as best you can, what the other party’s true needs and objectives are. In negotiating salary increase requests from employees, for example, it is essential to solicit the employee’s perspective — and to be able to accurately assess what may not be said aloud. With vendors or suppliers, knowing their break points — the bottom line they are willing to go to — as well as your own leveraging strengths with them, is critical to negotiating deals that are mutually acceptable.

Read about it here…

http://www.e-myth.com/cs/user/print/post/10-steps-to-effective-negotiation