Model of persuasion tools

Think about the last time you negotiated with someone. Perhaps you asked a colleague to support a new project, in return for helping them with a work task. Maybe you tried to persuade your partner to rearrange his or her schedule so you could have a night out with your friends?

Were you successful? Did you get the outcome you wanted? And do you think you used the correct approach in your negotiations?

There are many different techniques we can use in a negotiation. But we could be far more successful if we knew what approach to use, based on the skills and abilities that we already have.

In this article, we'll explore the Persuasion Tools Model. This model looks at your intuition and influencing ability, and matches this up with the approach that's likely to work best for you in negotiations. We'll also identify ways to further develop your overall negotiation skills.

Tip:

Don't just think of negotiation as something you only use in sales, or in supplier relationship management. You can use the skills and techniques we discuss in this article to develop your overall leadership and influencing skills, regardless of the role you are in.

The Persuasion Tools Model

The Persuasion Tools Model (see Figure 1 below) is based on work by the psychologist Kenneth Berrien. In his studies of applied psychology in the 1940s, he linked negotiation and persuasion style to emotional intelligence (EI).

The model can help you find the best negotiation approach to use, based on your level of intuition and your influencing capabilities. You can use the model to develop your influencing and persuasion skills, and become a better negotiator.

In this diagram, the horizontal axis represents influencing, which is a measure of your overall persuasion capability. The vertical axis represents the level of intuition required when using a certain negotiation style.

The quadrants highlight negotiation approaches that may work best for you, based on your levels of intuition and your influencing skills. These approaches are emotion, logic, bargaining, and compromise.

For example, if you have a low level of intuition but you're good at influencing others, the best approach would be to use logic in a negotiation. However, if you have low intuition and are poor at influencing others, the best approach would be to use compromise.

Next, we'll look at each quadrant, and identify examples of how you might use each particular negotiation style.

Emotion

Using emotion effectively in negotiation involves understanding the emotions and feelings of the people you are negotiating with to project your influence. So you need high levels of intuition, and good influencing skills.

For example, you and a strong competitor are pitching your services to the same client. You cannot offer a better service or lower price than your competitor. However, your organization invests some of its profits in charitable projects.

So, part of your negotiations include a presentation on how some of income from this deal with be used to help your chosen charity. You use a storytelling approach, including real life examples of how your organization has benefited charities in the past, and highlight the projects that the income from this particular deal will help towards.

Obviously, using emotion in negotiation can be risky, and you need to have a good understanding of the people you are negotiating with for it to be successful. For instance, the example above wouldn't be effective for an organization that only cared about making the biggest profits. Therefore, emotion is typically used by highly skilled negotiators who have high emotional intelligence and empathy with other people.

Note:

Sometimes, the emotion quadrant in the Persuasion Tools Model is represented by "threat/emotion."

Logic

With logic, you use facts and data to make your case. You

...