My Investigative Negotiations in Past and Things I Could Have Done Better

My Investigative Negotiations in past and things I could have done better

In 2010, I was working as a Business Development Executive with an IT firm. My main role was business to business selling. My company made software for animations explicitly 2D and 3D software’s. My role specifically involved doing market research, generating leads based on market research, cold calling the lead generated and pitching the sales idea to the company Vice President or the concerned head of the department of the company. I remember a call where I was successful getting past the gatekeeper and setting up a conference call with the company’s head to pitch the idea and close the sales. During the conference call, my manager and I briefly spoke with the other company’s Vice President regarding the product, its uses and costing. After a brief discussion, the Vice President of the other company said, “Sorry I would not be able to continue this call further as I find the costing of the software too high and the delivery time is very high”. He wanted the software to be delivered within 2 weeks whereas, our turnaround time was around 3-4 weeks. The call was ended without any conclusion, however, my manager asked me to send a follow up email to re-confirm his interest in the software. I emailed him to ask if he’s interested in the product and got a negative response. We realized that we lost a potential big client however, our company was not willing to cut down on the cost as required by the other company. Going through the investigative negotiation, I believe there were many things that could have been improved using the principals in the investigative negotiations.

First, we failed to understand and mitigate other side’s constraints. As described by D. Malhotra in Investigative negotiations, “Smart negotiators attempt to discover the other party’s constraints—and to help overcome them—rather than dismiss the other side as unreasonable or the deal as unworkable”. In this situation, my manager and I failed to understand why other party wants the software at a cheaper price. We failed to negotiate with the client in terms of price. We did not ask him if he is ready to sacrifice certain features of the software in order to cut down the cost of production and sell the product a cheaper price. However, we did not try this principal of negotiation.