Many negotiators try to achieve their desired outcome by imposing and asserting their demands, mistakenly thinking that the louder and more forcefully they assert, the more likely that the other side will acquiesce.

"We must have a 10% discount for this deal to go through!" they may proclaim, or "we will absolutely not accept anything below $1.8M for that property" they may announce!

Demands without reason and rationale such as these, seldom are successful at persuading and influencing the other party to agree.

Consider these same demands restated with some reason and rationale:

"We would like a 10% discount because we are thinking about entering into a two year exclusive contract with you" or "because we examined neighboring sales, real estate expert opinion and the bank evaluation, we think the average of those estimates would be a fair price for the property which is $1.8M"

In addition to appealing to the  human need for reason and rationale and thus being more compelling, it also opens up new doors to the dialogue of the negotiation. Instead of arguing over dollars and cents, they can now engage in productive negotiations about the relevancy and legitimacy of the rationale and reach agreement on the reasons and rationales that all parties can respect as being legitimate and fair.

A client was involved in a large commercial construction project and was negotiating the purchase of a comprehensive turnkey air-conditioning system for the buildings. When presented with what seemed to be an exorbitant quote, we insisted on the reason and rationale behind the quote. They presented us with a breakdown of all the chillers, vents, wiring, control panels, etc and informed us that this was based on the market price for these components and invited us to compare their quote to that of competitors. 

Once we understood that their reason and rationale was based on market value and comparison to competitors, we were able to take the discussions in a very different direction. We started by asking targeted questions (which are always the fuel for productive dialogue):

"Does the price include installation costs? What about the competitors?"

"What is your policy about storage in the event that the construction is not yet completed? How about your competitors?"

"What are maintenance and service costs policies? How do the competitors deal with that?"

"What about extended warranties?"

By asking good questions to help point out weaknesses in their reasoning, we were able to open and expand the dialogue beyond haggling over price. From their answers and doing some of our own research with competitors we soon learned that the competitors pricing included items and services that were not included in our quote and that the comparison was not entirely fair. By using reason and rationale as a strategy for authentic persuasion, we were able to achieve significantly better pricing, higher cost savings and improved terms for our client.