Understand Your Customer's Desire
A generally underrated part of successful negotiations is knowing your potential customer's desire. You've clarified your own desires in the previous step. Now it is equally important to find out what your customer longs for. There is a big difference between what your customer 'needs' and what your customer 'desires'. Desire is more powerful. Appealing to a need will satisfy your customer. Appealing to a desire will excite and delight your customer. Always keep in mind: Desire is the fabric of which dreams are made of.
When Apple marketed its first iPods, how did they do it? Did they use the standard 'Super-awesome MP3-player'-pitch of their competitors? Of course not. They came up with something simple and brilliant: They invented the slogan '1000 songs in your pocket'. BAM! The rest is history. Understanding your customer's desire makes all the difference. Answering the question, what desire you intend to appeal to will determine the value perceived by your customer, or in the case of salary negotiations: your future employer.
Master Sales Excellence
A good sales guy is not someone who can sell anything to anyone. A good sales guy is someone who understands desires and finds those people that desire (and value) a specific product or service the most. Great sales professionals instinctively seek to find the right customers for services and products that appeal to specific desires of their clients. In order to be able to do that, you have to do your research and ask the right questions. Start with this question: If you were in your employer's shoes, what would you wish for in an ideal employee? Follow up with: Why and how are you that employee? Maybe you have a certain set of values that make a perfect match. Maybe you have a specific mindset or skill set that fits just perfectly to the general mindset of the people that work for the company. It is your part to make these points clear and to sell. Don't regard this only as self marketing. Rather you're creating value in that you point out something that your negotiating counterpart might not have been aware of. Thus you propose a solution that is beneficial for the company's purpose in the first place.
Show That You Care
A great deal of understanding your customer's desires will depend on you asking the right questions. You will not be able to just google your customer's desires. To understand your customer you'll have to think in a wider and long term context. Show that you care about your customer's specific situation and the challenges he faces and try to understand and feel his pain. What are his current biggest rocks? What dangers lurk around corners? Maybe the current pandemic has had some positive and/or some negative impact on a certain branch or in a specific region. Maybe some technical development has recently disrupted some of their markets. Maybe some geopolitical development threatens their future growth strategy. The key message here: read, listen and try to understand. Only then, once you have processed the information, proceed to the next step:
Tell Your Story
Once you have a firm understanding of what is important to your potential employer, you can propose. Now the stage is truly yours and it's your time to shine. Propose your ideas and experiences in a way that your client sees the value for her purpose and can already envision you as part of her team. Don't just give an account of, but put your capabilities and skills into perspective. Always circle back to this pivotal question: How will your client benefit from anything you have to offer?
Unless you're fresh out of university, you will have made some valuable experience on the job. Maybe you gathered some impactful experience on a sabbatical or on a world trip. Think broadly. This experience is your portfolio of 'war stories'. It is not so important to have a vast collection of many war stories. The point is rather what kind of an 'emotional wake' your experience left on you and how good a storyteller you are, so that your audience can resonate with your stories.
Your client has acquired another company in eastern Europe recently? Tell the story how you managed to establish a multinational team to solve an important problem.
She struggles with the perspective of an ongoing transformation and constant change? Tell her how you went through a big transformation with your company and how you felt and dealt with the challenges. How did you benefit from the experience and how would you commit to the change, if you were to work for the company?
Explain the challenges you were facing, your role in that team, how you overcame the challenges and the impact the solution had on business. Make clear what you have learned in the process.
In case you don't have any work related stories, you might have gathered valuable experience during an internship.
Your Journey Beats Your Awards
More important than the trophies you have collected along the way is your journey. What were the most important crossroads that led to the person you are today? What were the experiences you made and how did they impact you? In the end people are less interested in results and more inclined to pay attention to the stories about the path and the struggles that led up to those results. If you want to make a remaining impression, focus on your journey instead of your goals and your achievements.
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