Give an example of a win-win situation you negotiated

Each day of my work life I am negotiating all related to new initiatives no matter I am program manager who is dealing with highly strategic initiatives (those that are critical to my actual work place survival). Beyond what you can name as "win-win" (I was trained in Harvard with William Ury) the only thing that works for me to create win-win situations is to demostrate to each person involved that they will be more rich with the solution than without the solution, where "rich" it does not mean more money in some cases.

Recently we negotiated with our new vendor to modify the licensing model for our enterprise wide cloud based healthcare application, so that it will allow more users to log into the system at the same time. We told them that the current model is not feasible, and at the same time we don't have money to pay for more licenses. We provided examples of various licensing models from their competitors ,and finally the vendor decided to increase the user licenses free of cost. Now, the stakeholders are very happy with this new contract.

Win-win doesn't have to be 50% for each negotiating side. I have recently negotiated with another company that holds a prime contract an agreement to extend the contract, where my firm serves as a subcontractor. I knew ahead of getting into the negotiation that they are not in favor of continuing since the money is too small for them. For my firm, we badly needed this contract because we want to build our qualification in a certain geographic area. I had no other alternative that would make my case strong, but I tried as hard as I can to make an appealing case for them and I took some of the administrative work from their plate which made sense for them by the end of the day. So they walked out with a nice profit margin, while I have a guaranteed extension for another 18 months.

Doing your homework ahead of time is really beneficial. Understanding the other side's situation can help a lot in negotiation.

What is mostly forgotten is this: win-win or any other situation that you will take into account is a matter of feeling at the end of the negotiation. Obviously, each part into the negotiation take a tactic and strategy driven by the culture of the organization mainly. But at the end the first thing is how each part feeling. No matter that, when all end (in fact, it never end) a review is made but when people made the review they will find a lot related if they achiteved the objectives or not.

Kevin,

Win-win is achieved when both parties are satisfied and don't feel cheated. To achieve maximum result for your part and get the other "happy". You need to understand the context of both sides, what are the limits what is acceptable.

Cost reduction could be an interesting negotiation point for both parties if the schedule allows for usage of a low demand period for execution.