(by Mathias Elrød Madsen)

For a more detailed guide to negotiation, please read the book “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it”

1. Ask for an offer on the product (for instance 1 full page in a given paper). Explain that you are an NGO so they already make the first offer a better one.
2. When you have the offer, decide the price you want to end up paying. It should be much lower than the list price. Maybe you can find out what other organisations have paid or usually pay and that will give you a clue.
3. Then calculate what is 60%, 80% and 90% of YOUR price. The 60% figure will be your first counter offer (it will probably seem ridiculously low but that is ok - they are playing the game too and they want to sell their product). If the negotiation goes by the book your next offer is the 80% figure and the third and final offer the 90%. Make this figure a very specific one indicating that it really is everything you can manage. Now, ideally, their next offer will be approximately the price you decided on to begin with.

Obviously the method is not bullet proof and my experience has been that sometimes you get an even better price than you went for and sometimes you cannot get them to go as low as you aimed for.

Tips

Rather than playing the role of a tough negotiator, be friendly and understanding. Act like you and the salesperson are in the same boat in the sense that you are both interested in finding a price that both parties can live with. More than negotiating you are actually cooperating on reaching this shared goal.

One specific way of doing this is for instance to make your superior the one who says no instead of you.

Here is an example of what a response to an offer that is still not good enough could be:

"Thank you for your last offer, I really appreciate you trying to accommodate me. Unfortunately, X is still more than my boss is willing to pay (or: However, I just talked to my boss and unfortunately x is still more than we can afford to spend on an ad like this). I realise you also need to make your boss happy, but what do you think of Y?"

There are of course cultural differences when it comes to negotiating, however hopefully you can use the above to some extent.