35. Becoming an expert negotiator – lessons from the pros

If you ask most agency leaders, very few will claim to enjoy negotiating. Sure, it’s a necessary part of business, but secretly most of them will be wondering how they could do things better. Could they have got negotiated better payment terms; could they have secured a larger remit with a client; could they have hired that senior person for less?

Plus, negotiating can be filled with emotion, and dealing with emotion in the workplace can be deeply uncomfortable.

This lively and at times, humorous episode of Waypointers features not one, but two experts discussing ways of improving negotiation skills, with scenarios lifted from their working lives. They clearly lived to tell the tale, but there were some potentially career ending moments along the way!

In the negotiation hotseat are Waypoint’s Jim Houghton, the author of a recent book, The Work Smarter Guide to Negotiation, co-written with Kirk Kinnell, a hostage negotiator and counter-terrorism expert, and chief negotiation officer Sam Macbeth, with many years’ experience helping business leaders and agency heads smarten up their negotiation tactics.  Picking their brains and asking the difficult questions is Waypoint partner, Phil Gripton.