Negotiating in business can be tough, especially when some people seemingly always get excellent deals while others have to settle for less. Luckily, negotiation is a skill that can be improved upon with strategy, technique, and style.
Adam Ferrari, a petroleum engineer, and entrepreneur has proven himself to be an effective and efficient negotiator. His engineering and finance experience influenced him to start his own mineral rights company, Ferrari Energy. In this article, Ferrari Energy CEO Adam Ferrari elaborates on three steps you can take to level up and become a more impactful and successful negotiator.
Step 1: Leave Your Ego at the Door
The first thing a great negotiator does is to abandon their ego at the start of a discussion. This is essential because collaboration and compromise require humility and flexibility. When you approach a negotiation with these things in mind, you are more likely to have meaningful and genuine conversations, which will allow you to come up with better solutions and solidify a professional bond with the other party.
Step 2: Practice Honesty
The easiest and fastest way to ruin any chance of effective collaboration is through dishonesty. For example, if you are working in sales, and you go into a meeting to discover that access to customer service is important for the client, do not lie and say that you have an established customer service team in place if that’s not the case. This is not only a burden to the business, but will also make the company (and you) look unethical when this service isn’t up to snuff. At the end of the day, if the company you are representing lacks quality customer service, the customer will eventually find out.
Step 3: Do Your Homework
It’s unprofessional to show up to a meeting or sales pitch unprepared. Skilled negotiators take time to prepare for each interaction with a client or organization. This could mean learning more about the other party, looking through previous conversations with team members and the client, and getting advice from coworkers that have already participated in preliminary negotiations. Taking the time to learn about the organization can help a negotiator truly get to know who they are dealing with, which will allow them to adjust their body language, tone, verbiage, and style of the pitch accordingly.
About Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari is a petroleum engineer and entrepreneur. After graduating Magna Cum Laude, he worked in both the engineering and finance sectors and used this experience to build his Denver-based mineral rights and acquisition company, Ferrari Energy, from the ground up. The interest and success of Ferrari Energy have afforded Adam the opportunity to give back to the community. He supports various non-profit organizations, including St. Jude Children’s Hospital, Freedom Service Dogs, Denver Rescue Mission, Coats for Colorado, and Next Steps of Chicago.