Negotiation reflection journal

Rudolph-Lama I played Chris Rudolph in this case, and did well in this negotiation by not only focusing on the final price, but also on the extra agreement of letting Lama provided high quality work to our company. When we started the negotiation, I suggested us to divide the total price into two parts, the first one was Market Research fee, and the second one was the Lama-Lee’s charge. After some initial discussion, I realized the Market Research fee was hard to negotiate, so I planed to put most of my effort on Lama-Lee’s fee. My negotiation partner impressed me by setting the price at $33,000, and made me think that he had to charge us at $33,000. This increased my expected level of payment a lot. Before he gave the first offer, I was thinking that I want to use the $27,000 as the start point and ask for some discount based on this price. But my partner made me feel that the $33,000 was the final payment they were targeting by listed the detailed hour rate and the hours. Thus I was in a very passive position that I felt every argument I made was asking him for a favor to give me a discount. Thus when my partner finally agreed to charge us at $27,000, I felt that I had a big win, and I agreed to bring him more projects in the future. When I came back to classroom and looked at other classmates’ outcomes, I realized that my price $27,000 was quite high, someone even settled at the price of $22,000. Then I started to think what mistake I did during this case. I believed that my major mistake was that I changed my mind too easily. When my partner made the first offer of $33,000, I just raised my own expected price from $22,000 to $27,000. Because I told myself that it was impossible for me to convince my partner take the $22,000 offer. I could do it differently by letting myself made the first offer at $22,000, and stick to the point that I need to control the budget. Maybe in that case I can also influence my partner’s expected price.