Beyond Dealmaking: Five Steps to Negotiating Profitable Relationships

Chapter 9. ARGUMENTS — MAKING YOUR CASE

You have considered your goals and the best routes for achieving them. Now you need to marshal your Arguments—the explanations and evidence that support every proposal and every concession you make. In Chapter Five, I emphasized the importance of basing your negotiating position on reason and fairness instead of on feeding bears. Now let's look at how to do that.

Before explaining how to frame an acceptable argument, however, we need to have a clear idea of what an argument is and, just as important, what it is not. First, "argument" in the negotiation context does not mean a quarrel (a sure path to breakdown in a negotiation). Nor does it mean loudly insisting on your viewpoint or relentlessly building a ...