Reading The Other Side s Deadline

Reading The Other Side’s Deadline

In everyday negotiations, deadlines can tell you a lot about the other side’s positions. Of course, deadlines aren’t necessarily presented as deadlines. Sometimes they’re sweetened a bit so they look like incentives. You walk into the model of a condo development, and the saleswoman greets you at the door. “We’re having a special this month only,” she says. “If you buy before Monday, you’ll pay only $500,000.”

Aside from telling you that housing prices are way out of whack, the saleswoman has given you a price parameter—and one that extends beyond Monday. Now it’s possible that something really is going to happen on Monday that will change everything. And it’s also possible that someone else will buy the house in the meantime. But in that situation the customer really should ask himself what would happen if he showed up Tuesday morning with $500,000 in hand. Would he be turned away?

But let’s say the deadline is real, or at least a soft one, and your research shows that the saleswoman has an incentive to close a deal by Monday. You either do some sleuthing on your own, or the saleswoman keeps coming back to it again and again, which makes you ask why she wants to close that quickly.

And she tells you. Why wouldn’t she, if she wants to make the sale and the deadline is in fact real? Failing to answer is the same as admitting that the deadline isn’t real, which presumably she doesn’t want to do.

Her incentive may not be big—maybe she can’t stand this particular model and would like to be done with it. But in sales situations especially, managers often use time periods to motivate their staff: Sell so many widgets or condos by the end of the month and you get to go Hong Kong. More ominous for the salesman are the quotas: Sell so many widgets by the end of the month or you’re out of here. Quotas and artificial deadlines are especially popular in auto sales, where things like monthly finance charges can put pressure on management to move product.

So she owns the deadline. It’s her problem, something you can use to help her reach a successful resolution.

Like getting real and selling you that condo for a price a working man can afford.

Someone else’s deadline is just that—someone else’s deadline. Let it put pressure on the other side to deal. As the clock winds down, the other side will feel more and more pressure to settle. While you, of course, should be feeling no pressure at all.