Purchasing and Negotiation Training

Robert Menard
Certified Purchasing Professional,
Certified Professional Purchasing Consultant, Certified Green Purchasing Professional, Certified Professional Purchasing Manager

Editor’s Note:  This is the first part of a four part series on using professional negotiation skills as applied to personal life.  The tone is intended to be light and instructive but ultimately demonstrates just how critically important your negotiation skills can be in this entirely (certainly so) “hypothetical” story.  See the Research, Planning, and Strategy of Part 2 , the Denouement of Part 3 and the Lessons Learned of Part 4.

Do you agree with this premise? 

 Many if not most professional buyers are fair to good professional negotiators but marginal to poor personal negotiators.  Our personal negotiation skills dwindle in direct proportion to emotional influences. 

One supporting reason for this premise is that in more than one thousand public seminars in the 1990s, the topic of buying a car was by far the most popular challenge raised by the audiences.  In later years, this observation prompted me to author an online course on How to Buy a New or Used Car . 

 The Duck Metaphor

 The Duck Metaphor explains how the personal overwhelms the reasonable.  As professional buyers, we are somewhat a duck out of water when it comes to buying personal vehicles.  Ducks know the moves and noises to make but the landscape is different from their accustomed and more comfortable waters.  Ducks also know that they are not as adept at countering predators on land as we are on water. 

The car buying experience trends toward the emotional sector or “right brain” for a number of important factors and thus reduces our negotiating ability.  Personally, a vehicle may be a necessity, a luxury, or anything in between on the continuum of “needs-to-wants”.   

We buyers probably do a better job than the average duck but know in our hearts that we did not do as well as we do on the waters at work.  Who enjoys that heartburn? 

The uncomfortable reality of the personal negotiation 

As if the car buying negotiation were not sufficiently stressful and unsatisfactory, we face other negotiations for which we are less prepared or capable because they involve a deeply personal well of emotion on our part.  These negotiation situations typically involve children and/or parents. 

In order to clear the fog of confusion we all might experience in these situations, let’s just concentrate on one hypothetical albeit painful situation involving almost adult children.   

The scenario

 For the purposes of purely speculative illustration, let us assume a fictional scenario involving a college age daughter.  We’ll call her Jane.  After high school, in which Jane was not the best of students, she enrolls in college the following fall and lives in a campus dorm.  Her maturity and responsibility are not her long suits but Jane is a loving and bright young woman who has yet to achieve her potential.  Can anyone empathize with this scenario so far? 

During her first semester, the increase in freedom and shortage of self-discipline combine to damage her scholastics but all this free time inures to the benefit of Jane’s social life.  The college’s policy is to make no effort to assign compatible roommates so the stress of sharing a room with a young woman of twice her size who’s cultural life style is quite a shock to Jane’s system.  The two roommates were not friends and had each turned in the other to campus authorities for alleged offenses. 

The conflict

On the Friday night before Thanksgiving week, Jane returns to her dorm room about 3 AM Saturday (Yes, I know but let’s stick to the negotiation angle) and interrupts her roommate entertaining an illegal visitor on the property.  In that some unspecified form of “flagrante delicto” was transpiring, the couple evacuate the room immediately to deprive Jane of an opportunity to report a major misdeed. 

Fearing retribution from the very large and in Jane’s view, uncouth roommate, she barricades the door to deny reentry to the roommate and preserve personal safety in case both offenders return.  The situation devolved into a pushing match which the larger woman wins.  Fearing for her safety (As later related to her purely “theoretical” father), Jane switches from defense and surprises her roommate with a few slaps.  The roommate retreats but nothing is settled, yet. 

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The plot thickens

 The roommate reports the assault to the campus housing authorities (a loose reference to bureaucrats with no access to common sense) and Jane is thrown off campus the very same day before noon.  The transgression of which Jane is convicted is “campus violence”, a buzz word related to the VMI massacres of the previous year.  There are ten class days remaining before the Christmas break. 

 Jane had no vehicle so her friends transported her and all of her belongings to a friend who had a tiny (300 SF) apartment in town that she shared with her tiny infant.  Having exhausted her alternatives, Jane is forced to call her parents on Saturday night.  The parents, to no one’s surprise, are not told the whole story, but while not enamored of the situation, they recognize that their girl needs help.  Mom and Dad drive three hours to Jane’s college where they meet her for a late dinner and an overnight at a local hotel.   

Now what?

 Over dinner, Jane relates the travel of her case.  She omits some damaging facts but on balance, it seems like the college has acted inappropriately.  The decision is taken to return to the family domicile on Sunday morning and plan a counter attack, or in more familiar terms, a negotiation strategy. 

 What would your strategy be?  Go to the Research, Planning, and Strategy (link) to learn what they did.