ReportWire

Tag: tactics

  • 6 Tactics You Need For Successful Negotiations

    6 Tactics You Need For Successful Negotiations

    [ad_1]

    Whether you’re a sales broker, a remote worker in tech, or on the cusp of launching a new career, negotiating is an essential skill for success. I’ve witnessed countless times during my 25 years of experience in real estate how finding mutually beneficial terms—while steadily navigating conflict—can lead to a winning result for all sides. Negotiating occurs at various levels, ranging from discussing details for an initial contract or sales agreement to large-scale business deals with meetings that last for a year or more.

    To gain the right skills to get ahead, sign the deal or make the sale, follow these tactics.

    1. Listen First when Negotiating

    Ask questions to learn what’s important to the other party, advises Chris Voss, who served as the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI and has taught business negotiations at Harvard University, among others. Chris is the author of “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.” When I had the chance to hear him speak on the topic, he stressed the importance of having empathy toward the other side and listening to them. Sometimes the other side is mostly looking to be heard and validated.

    2. Negotiate Beyond the Price

    While negotiating is often associated with the sale of a property or securing a salary package, the parties involved might not have money as their top goal. There’s a legendary saying that often gets referenced during acquisitions, “You name the price—I’ll set the terms.” The phrase brings up a great point: there’s more to a deal than just the sales figure.

    I recently worked on a transaction in which the client wanted to maximize the price of a property. The buyer was a developer, and stated they could get to that price if they had a larger window of time. The two parties were able to come to an agreement in which the purchaser took longer to close, which enabled them to get the project approved and financed. The seller, for their part, needed time to relocate, so the end game was a win-win.

    3. Find Common Ground When Negotiating

    At first glance, some deals may seem black and white, but negotiations can often bring other details to the surface. After several discussions, the parties might find they have mutual goals and agree to find a way to come together. Taking different profiles of sellers and buyers, which might include big corporations on one side, and mom-and-pop retailers on the other, and finding common ground requires time, effort, and a dose of creativity. However, these conversations tend to be what I most enjoy about the job. Once parties find ways they can benefit, the outcome is often positive.

    4. Keep a Long-Term View

    The answers rarely appear during an initial conversation. Sometimes months, or even longer, are required to truly develop a plan that will work. When forming a strategic partnership, Apple and LG Display carried out initial negotiations for over a year, as reported by the Harvard Business School Online Business Insights Blog. Apple hoped to gain a reliable organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen supplier, while LG Display aimed to expand its business. After a year of discussions over price, production capacity, and quality control, the two came to an agreement. When the iPhone X was launched, which featured LG’s OLED displays, it quickly became the best-selling smartphone in the world, according to Counterpoint Research.

    5. Opt for the High Road

    Chris Voss mentions applying a late night, FM, DJ voice to negotiating discussions, as it often can lead to an atmosphere that is calm and effective. When tempers are lost at the table, the negative consequence is that it might lead to long-term adversarial conditions. On the other hand, taking the high road, even if the other party seems to be following different rules, can lead to a better settlement in the end—and help you maintain integrity.

    6. Take Time to Anchor the Negotiation

    Before having a discussion with the other party, think about where you want to ultimately land. Spend the time needed to properly prepare and research, so you have your supporting points ready. This can help you navigate the conversation and lay out the way to move toward what you’re hoping to accomplish.

    Developing negotiating skills typically involves time and practice. Reaching out to a mentor, or signing up for additional coursework, could help you further build these traits. Once you have them refined, you’ll be able to move forward in business, sales, or your profession to achieve—and maintain—long-term success.

    [ad_2]

    James Nelson, Contributor

    Source link

  • This is What You Need in Your 5-Year Marketing Plan

    This is What You Need in Your 5-Year Marketing Plan

    [ad_1]

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    We’ve all heard the interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Marketers routinely take that question and apply it to their marketing strategies. They figure out what they want to achieve and then develop actionable steps to get there. Keep in mind, these plans aren’t designed to be all-encompassing. They serve as a guidebook for different scenarios while getting the team thinking about what they’d like to accomplish long-term.

    Your five-year plan is a way to build an overarching metric for how you’re doing — or how you plan to do over the next half-decade. There are many things to consider when building your plan — here are a few to look at carefully:

    The 3 key buckets

    A successful five-year marketing plan should fixate on three main questions:

    1. What assumptions can you make about the next five years within your company?
    2. What goals do you want to achieve?
    3. What are the metrics you’ll use to measure those goals?

    Assumptions are what you think won’t change in the business over the next five years. For example, you might assume that you will continue using particular vendors or that packaging costs will remain stable. From there, you can determine your goals — like boosting sales by 50% or converting 10,000 new customers. The metrics that measure your progress might be units sold or your company’s market share. It’s essential to include both readily-accessible metrics — such as website views — and brand metrics that might be a bit harder to come by, such as the associations your customers have made with your products or company.

    Importantly, there’s no “right” or “wrong” when it comes to answering these questions. Every business has its own vision, resources and position, which all influence its marketing strategy. The aim is to develop a plan that will produce the most desirable outcome for you, rather than worrying about what other businesses have the capacity to do.

    Related: Use These 5 Steps to Create a Marketing Plan

    Narrowing your focus

    Just like consumer preferences, marketing tactics are constantly shifting. Social media demonstrates this well. Because social media platforms have skyrocketed over the past two decades, marketers no longer rely solely on traditional platforms such as print or television ads. And even within social media, things aren’t constant. TikTok has become one of the fastest-growing platforms, quickly overtaking Facebook.

    With so many options, your marketing plan must keep a narrow focus. For some companies, TikTok doesn’t matter. They can’t yet measure the return they’re getting from the platform, so this isn’t exactly a feasible opportunity. Don’t be tempted to try everything or be everywhere. It’s a matter of isolating what you practically can use to give you the insights that will help you.

    Two questions will help focus your strategy:

    • How do your goals compare to last year?
    • What are you striving for (e.g., enhancing the brand vs. increasing brand awareness)?

    How you answer those questions will help you identify where and how to focus your efforts so you don’t get lost in a bunch of small, irrelevant tactics.

    Using your budget

    Most people think of budgets as being stable or hard data — but almost all companies work with unknowns. In reality, the best they can do is come up with an educated guess that seems to make sense – a ballpark range. Because nobody can plan with certainty for every scenario — and because it’s so easy to become overwhelmed with an infinite range of outcomes — it’s advisable to lean on a few key financial assumptions and build a strategy around those.

    Once you have a budget figure to work with, create high and low projections for everything you want to do. Let’s say the aim is to get to 50% brand awareness. What would your plan look like if you exceeded that and got to 75%? Alternatively, what would you do if awareness went down to 25%? Creating these high and low projections will let you design a more flexible approach and avoid being caught too off guard.

    As you come up with your main scenarios and high-low projections, think about the key internal drivers you’ll need to address next year. Consider the risks, and assess whether you’ll have the data, technology and skills to develop and maintain what you expect to put forward. Keep in mind that it’s more important to pivot when issues come up than to predict what’s going to happen accurately.

    Related: 4 Tips for Developing a Marketing Plan That Will Actually Grow Your Business

    Paint flexibly within your broad strokes

    A five-year marketing plan paints a broad, long-term picture of how you’ll communicate with your audience while giving details about your projected products or services. It includes assumptions and factors that aren’t necessarily static, so you have to approach it with a grain of salt and be ready to shift gears if the plan doesn’t work.

    Even so, if you stick to three key buckets (assumptions, goals and metrics), keep your tactical focus narrow and incorporate multiple projections in your budget, you should end up with a strategy that blends the data and flexibility needed to strive in a changing world. Because annual marketing plans need to connect to your long-term marketing vision, let the annual marketing meetings serve as check-in points to keep your longer-term marketing plan relevant and viable.

    [ad_2]

    David Partain

    Source link