"Improving Your Negotiating Skills: Tips learned in the Trenches" by David Wachtel

Your plan should include the following:

Try to determine the negotiating style of the other party (DiSC© style). This helps you think through how best to communicate and then go through the process of confirming if you were correct. If you do not know the other party at all, you will have to make educated guesses and adjust as you go.
What are our/my interests? This is not what you want, but why. Make sure that you examine all of your interests as there may be more than one.
What are the interests of the other side? A major part of the negotiation process is determining the other side's interests. This goes back to Fisher and Ury's definition of negotiations…where some interests are shared and some are opposed. Opposing interests are what you negotiate.
What do I have that I can trade that is low value to me and of high value to the other side? In the give and take phase of the negotiation process, having considered these options ahead of time can make this less stressful. Less effective negotiators will not have considered this, and will want to go through a series of positional compromises.
What are three options I can use to move the negotiation from compromising to joint problem solving? These can all begin with, "What if we tried…?", or "What if we did this…?
What is the very least that is acceptable?

You must determine:
1. What do we aspire to?
2. What will we be content with?
3. What can we live with?

April 2005