Negotiations

Solution Preview

Being a sales manager in a construction company, I come across the negotiation situation very often. My company, being comparatively new in business, tries to offer its customer the best price in the market. For that reason, my company needs to find the suppliers who can offer us supply materials at a manageable price for us so that we can keep our pricing competitive and at the same time reduce our expenses, and eventually, we can increase the company profit.
But, most of the supply companies have their regular customers already who get special price from these companies, but, we being stranger to them can't get hold of such offers.

The Negotiation situation:

Couple of years ago, we had a construction project that we had to complete within 15 months and we were in need of supply materials at manageable rate. We started to look for suppliers and most of them couldn't offer a good price for us. Then, I followed a strategy, which helped our company to get the lowest price supplier in the market. I started calling directly to the supply companies and kept the discussion focused on material prices, rather than trying to make friendly relation with them. Those companies took me as a professional who really wants to do good business and then they offered their lowest prices thinking that it would help them to do more business in future. Finally, after talking quickly over phone with several companies, we got our supplier that offered us the lowest price of all the companies were offering.

After getting the list of prices from that company we compared the prices with other companies, even we went to other companies to about their views on this list price. Those companies agreed that this is the lowest price and it would not be easy for them to offer us such low prices. So, after judging the market and getting views from other supply companies we finally approached for our lowest offering supply company and from then we are good business partner and we are getting more jobs for each other and gaining profit for our respective company. During this process, I felt that the communication strategy and personality factor played a very important role and it is described below in more details.

Role of communication in negotiation:

Negotiation is a form of interpersonal communication and we know that, whether verbal or non-verbal, communication processes are critical to ...