So this is the final week in negotiation, it's called post negotiation. I'm going to take you through this and I think many of you say, "Well, who doesn't do that?" Well, in my personal experiences that many times, when you're coming up to a negotiation in a year or two years later, and you say, where are those notes from that negotiation? A lot of people look at you like deer-in-headlights and it's not there, or as you're ready to implement this program and you've issued the purchase order and the goods are coming in. One of the key stakeholders said, well, you didn't tell me that. So I'm going to walk you through this. These are the things you do after the negotiation is completed. It's probably one of the most important things that you need to do not only for yourself, but sometimes you get promoted or moved or whatever and the person behind you needs this notes in the file and a permanent memory for the organization. So let's get started. So obviously you're going to go ahead and issue a contract here. You're going to load the contract basically into some ERP database. You're going to want to give some performance feedback to the business to say this particular one here, you want to establish those performance criteria that we talked about in strategic sourcing, and you're going to be monitoring this on an ongoing basis and you're going to reaffirm all commitments to all parties. So we're going to go through that in a minute. So one of the most important, the first thing you do is you're going to brief stakeholders in the business. So these are the people that you've worked with either in manufacturing or in marketing or in finance or whatever to put this particular strategic sourcing together and completed it with a contract. You want to make sure you communicate with them so they're aware of what any issues were that you didn't resolve and you don't want to have any surprises form. So you're basically trying to get buy-in from them. So you want to do that for all stakeholders and this might as an example, include, depending on your organization, maybe it's your boss or your boss's boss, whoever you need to debrief on the putting the contract in place. So this is the second thing I always recommend to do, which is post negotiation is after action reviews. So this is really one of the most overlooked processes in negotiation. For those of you who've been in the military, you're probably familiar with AARP's. It's a very common methodology that whenever you're doing in the military, they'll stop and everybody will stand in a circle and basically debriefed what just happened, what lessons learned. You should never skip this. What it really is, it's a continuous improvement activity where you say, what are some things we could improved in? What are some things we missed? You want to review what your mission was and whether you achieved it? You want to reconstruct what happened in and around the negotiation, you really want to think about what your underlying reasons for wins and losses, and what are you going to do next time? Next time could be a year out, two years, whatever the length of the contract is, and you want to basically put that in writing and put it in a file for either yourself or the next person that picks up this particular strategic item. So I'm going to walk through a couple of just tips for being an effective negotiator. Basically, you've got to be willing to compromise. You can't go in there headstrong and say "It's my way or the highway." So what's important is we talked about concessions. What are you willing to give up that they may want, in turn for what you need. As we said earlier, you have this upper and lower range of every issue, the must-haves and the wants and hopefully you don't give away any must-haves, but on the same token, some of those wants it's okay to give them away and hopefully get something in return as we talked about concessions. You want to build upon common ground. Probably if it's a large item, strategic item of preferred supplier, whatever it is, you're going to be back in this negotiation table sometime in the future. So you want to think about what did we agree together? Let's build upon that to have better successes for both of us in the future. I would recommend you don't make a lot of irritating comments, it really doesn't do anything for the negotiation and don't get into this argument of state is a mentioned in tactics you want to be able if there's any type of temperature raising in the room, sometimes it's good to say, "Let's take a quick break and when we come back, let's deal with the issues later on. Let's go through these other issues first," and basically hopefully minimize any argumentation for both sides. As I said, in concessions that we talked about, make fewer counterproposals, make them less infrequent, always get something in return. This is really important when you're thinking about your strategy in negotiation. So based on what are some reasons that negotiations fail? Sometimes you just neglect the other party's problems. I mean, they're here to try to get something wins for them and you really want to listen hard and figure out what you're going to do. Remember I talked about focusing on positions versus interests. So it maybe his position that he felt he got wrong in the last negotiation. So don't focus on that. You want to focus on the interest of both parties and neglecting BATNAS. I talked about the importance of BATNAS. You don't have a BATNA, you don't come to an agreement, what are you going to do? You've got to have a plan and really that's your strength in a negotiation. Then sometimes there's a lot of perceptions that happen during the negotiation, people overreact as I said earlier, and you just want to be careful that you calm that situation down. So these are just a couple of reasons for failed negotiations and that really wraps up this particular activity on post negotiations. So let's look at a couple of key takeaways and then look at what successful negotiators do. First of all, don't forget to brief your key stakeholders or your boss whoever you need to do it in the organization. Then make sure you do an after action review. At Colgate we used to call it continuous improvement. Doesn't make any difference in which you call it. But you want to stop, get the team together, whoever's involved on your side and say what worked and didn't work and how are we going to improve next time? Then put the notes from the negotiation in the file such that the next time you come up there, you review them. One of the first things you would do is review those negotiation notes. So what makes a successful negotiator? Well, I think that as we said earlier, that they realize that training and planning and practice are really the keys. As I said in the very beginning when I opened up this particular course on negotiation, people aren't born negotiators. They know that they can be trained, they do good planning and they practice. One example would be one of my best negotiation, a guy named Bruce in Colgate. He was the best negotiator we had in the department and we used him as a resource many times. So what does he do? He comes to me and says, "I want to go to Harvard to learn more about negotiation, and this is why I went to this win-win type of course that Harvard offers." My point is, even he wanted more training to try to be a better negotiator. Usually they have higher goals. When we talked about setting goals, usually they're much more aspirational higher. Therefore, even though you don't get it, you end up with usually better outcome from the negotiation. Then lastly, an interesting thing, if you're really a good negotiator, they may rely upon your skills in the organization to do some other things. So one example for us at Colgate was the sales group approached us and said, "Would you help train our salespeople in negotiation?" That's because your organization recognized it and valued our skill set there and we did. We trained many of the salespeople on how to negotiate with their partners as they're trying to sell in their products of toothpaste and soap, etc. So that's it for negotiation. I look forward to seeing you in the wrap-up in course 7.
