Now that you’ve completed the first two parts of the validation step—gathering information from colleagues and public sources and preparing for the validation meeting with your customer—it’s time to go to the final part, the meeting itself.
Of course, few sellers or buyers think of this face-to-face validation of their estimations as part of the negotiation. They see it, if they consider it at all, as “planning” for the negotiation. In fact, this phase of the Strategic Negotiation Process is not only part of the negotiation but is one of the most—if not the most—critical and central aspects. It’s in this phase of the negotiation—the validation meeting—that you will be able to do the following:
Educate your customer about their CNA
Educate your customer about your CNA
Learn more about the items on your customer’s Wish List
Help your customer rank and weight the items on their Wish List
Share the items on your Wish List with your customer
Broaden the trading beyond single-item, zero-sum concessions
Notwithstanding these potential results, in a sense only two things are really going on in a validation meeting. The first of these is sharing and trading information. Paradoxically, the fact that most customers don’t even see sharing information as part of the negotiation actually works to your benefit because, as a result, they’re likely to share more freely. Ultimately, of course, it’s trading information that enables you to learn more about what your customer wants and to let him or her know better what you want. And that, in turn, is what enables you to formulate offers that, by trading as many items as possible, exceed both sides’ CNA and create real value. Later on in this chapter I’ll tell you about some of the tactics you can use to facilitate sharing information.
The second thing that’s going on in a validation meeting is one side or the other—or both—using that sharing and trading of information to set the tone for the negotiation. This is done by establishing what G. B. Northcraft and M. A. Neale call an “anchor” in their article, “Amateurs, Experts and Real Estate: An Anchoring and Adjustment Perspective on Property Pricing Decisions” (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, 39, 1987). An anchor is a starting point for one aspect of a negotiation or, in some instances, an entire negotiation. An anchor can be true or false, appropriate or inappropriate, in any given negotiation. Nevertheless, only anchors that are both true and appropriate can be beneficial to both you and your customer, as only such anchors will enable you to create value.