Thank you Alok for Negotiating

This Post is all about an article and its implementation that  had been posted a while back on therodinhoods.wpengine.com

“Top Ten Negotiations that would never fail you” (https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/ten-negotiation-tips-that-will)

I run a Backpacking company in India called The Indian Backpacker (www.indianbackpacker.com) and have been following therodinhoods.wpengine.com since Day 1 🙂

I had an important meeting lined up to be the “Tourism Partner” for Company X (cant mention the name because of some issues) in India, they had a lot of foreign interns coming here who love to Backpack across India and hence the deal was IMPORTANT.

Their offer was plain and simple : They would feature our Logo on all their events as a Tourism Partner for 2012 and in return we had to pay them Rs 2,50,000  for the entire year.

Now honestly it was not in our budget to sponsor something for 2.5L at that point of time and thats when this article totally Rocked for us.

I used a few of the Points :

1.) Before meeting the concerned person me and my other 2 partners researched each and everything possible about their backgrounds,organization and the scope of exposure we could get and what more we could get from them.

2.) Role – Playing – We decided our roles as 1 being the nice guy who makes the representative  from company X feel comfortable and break the formal barrier, the second partner was supposed to play the totally professional business person and I was supposed to balance the two out and negotiate.

3.) Once we had given a brief about our company, our next step was “Refuse what we wanted” (bring down the price). So we started with that we are totally cool with the price but explained that our aim is to HELP all the interns who come to India so we should be allotted to be their Travel agent too but to our surprise they were ok with that.

We then demanded for a small session in the induction program which is done by company X representatives for these interns to which they again agreed

Next we tried to demand even for their outbound business (visa consultation and other bookings) for any person who goes from India,which too was agreed for ,So the whole “Refuse what you want” had kind off got us into a difficult spot.

Just then our “research” reminded me that we are dealing with Company X-1 and there is another branch Company X-2, and thus my next demand or rather question was “So we get this deal with both of your Branches right ?” to which her obvious Answer was NO.

My reaction back was in a  simple low tone “So the 2.5Lakhs is just for Company X-1 ?”

And as soon as she said YES, me and my entire team just used the next tip  and went all “SILENT” 
Before you knew it, the sitiuation became so awkward for her that she herself said “I can ask the other VP’s and see if we can try to bring down the amount in that case.”

Conclusion : We got the deal for an entire year at an unbelievable price…….also added a lot of business for our company instead of a simple logo Presence at events……..!! 

I would have loved to put it out on therodinhoods.wpengine.com last year but for certain privacy issues couldn’t do that, I seriously cant thank Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal enough for all the things I have learnt from him and this amazing forum.