According to the Rolling Stones, “You can’t always get what you want.” However, with the right negotiation skills, you just might find you get what you need and what you want.

If you want to succeed in business — and in life — you need to learn how to negotiate successfully. Martin E. Latz, founder and CEO of Latz Negotiation, is an expert on this topic, and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and CBS. He is the author of “Gain the Edge! Negotiating to Get What You Want,” and has worked with an extensive list of clients, including Nike, GE, RE/MAX, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bank of America, Progressive, and ConocoPhillips.

Latz has five golden rules of negotiation. MultiBriefs asked him to provide insight on the first rule: “Information is Power — So Get It!”

The Power of Information

Effective negotiating is proven to be effective, but you have to do your homework. Latz says this entails three steps:

Get information to set your own goals.

“You can’t negotiate strategically based on the experts’ proven research if you don’t internally evaluate and set your own objectives.” Latz says your strategy should be driven by your goals.

“Likewise, you can’t achieve your goals unless you also step into your counterparts’ shoes and find out their goals.” This may sound like a no-brainer, but he says that many negotiations have floundered and failed because the parties didn’t take these two steps.

Explore and uncover substantive information like facts and underlying interests, not just positions.

It’s not that hard to find out what the other party wants; for example, more money or a corner office. “However, it’s far more challenging to dig down and explore their true interests — why they want it.”

  • What’s the true reason your counterpart is sitting across the table from you?
  • What’s really motivating their desires and needs?
  • What’s their hidden agenda?
  • Is it just about money, or is it ego and the desire to “win?”

If you can drill down and discover their true motivation, you’re on the path to negotiating successfully.

“I once consulted on the sale of a small software company where the founder was a serial entrepreneur who wished to sell his company to the dominant player in his industry,” Latz says. His client was already wealthy from previous sales, and while he wanted a fair price, that wasn’t his primary goal.

“He wanted to take over the innovation division of the acquirer, have a significant budget to further explore his inventions, and report directly to the acquirer’s CEO,” Latz says. “His motivation, his core interest was to truly transform the industry with the intellectual property he had developed with his relatively small software company — and personally get the credit for it.”

Get strategic intelligence about your counterpart

There’s a difference between gathering information on your counterpart and really doing your homework to find strategic intelligence on your counterpart.

For example, what is your counterpart’s reputation as a negotiator? “This not only involves finding out if your counterpart is bright, honest and trustworthy — but it means finding out if they often walk out of negotiations, and then come back to the table.”

When the deal appears to be done, do they continue to request small changes? How often do they make the first offer? How aggressively do they exercise their leverage?

“This is the type of intelligence that will often empower you to make the best strategic and tactical decisions in many negotiations,” Latz says. So, how can you uncover that type of information? He says you can talk to people who have negotiated with them in the past.

“Then, you can use that strategic intelligence to help predict what they will do — or not do — in your negotiations.” There’s a reason why governments around the world spend billions of dollars trying to gather this type of intelligence on their adversaries — and allies. “We should do this type of homework in our negotiations, too,” Latz recommends.