COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID

• Looking for publicly available data on your customer’s Wish List. It’s rarely ever available.

• Getting stuck in the trap of using validation to reinforce what you want to believe. It’s important that you focus on the real facts of this negotiation, even if you don’t particularly like or agree with them.

Thus far you have developed a goal to “create joint value and divide it given concerns for fairness in the ongoing relationship,” conducted Consequences of No Agreement and Wish List Estimations for both sides in the negotiation, and begun to validate your estimations by soliciting help from others in your organization and from public sources. Although both are excellent sources of information about your customer, the ultimate source is always the customers themselves. And the best way to get information from them is to ask for it. But there are many ways of soliciting information, and depending on how you do it, you will find yourself with anything from no useful information at all to an enormous amount of data that you can apply to the negotiation. The next part of the validation step, preparing for the validation meeting with your customer, is designed to enable you to elicit as much good information as possible and to do so in a way that will not only not alienate your customer but, in fact, make him or her eager to continue working with you. And that part of the step is the subject of the next chapter.