Merging negotiation techniques with your opportunity pipeline to maximize offers
Posted by Burt Hadlock on February 21, 2008
Merging negotiation techniques with your opportunity pipeline to maximize offers.
When you should you begin the negotiation process when you are job hunting?
Before you even identify a potential employer!
Having determined that a pipeline approach to the job search is your plan you are off to a great start in your future compensation negotiation.
As you build your categories and begin to develop discovery questions the negotiation process can be embedded within the pipeline.
As an example an early priority should be to determine your compensation requirements before investigating any leads. Make sure your discovery and research are set up in such a way as to learn if the position has the potential to meet your compensation requirements. Disqualify early any leads that are obvious and profound financial mismatches. The key here is to use a fairly rough gauge and look for positions within a range. This range is of your choosing and in the early stages can be optimistic.
As you progress a lead through the pipeline your questions and tactics should comprehend that you are in a negotiation from the start. Most of your questions will not be of a make or break yes/no variety but rather design to help you learn as much as possible about the situation as possible before an offer is formed. Your ultimate objective is to have an employer you’d be delighted to work for write you an offer you’d be delighted to accept. Only through a thorough discovery process with questions devised to help form that offer can you get there.
Formulate a list of compensation components that matter to you and place questions designed to discover how the employer might provide meet your needs. Use great interrogation techniques and don’t be afraid to ask questions you feel you already know the answer to.
Remember to work from broad brush queries to finer strokes as a position migrates from lead to offer. A generality such as “What can you tell me about the company’s financial condition?” will soon enough become a specific such as “How can we finalize this offer by adding two weeks of vacation time?”
