Does Your Sales Negotiation Acknowledge The Deadline Effect

Abhinay Muthoo is a Dean of Warwick Business School. A uni so keen to get noticed they’ve even bought perimeter video ads on the current Windies England cricket tour.

Professor Muthoo writes books on negotiation. With the imminent departure of the UK from the EU set by statute as 29 March 2019, there’s much discussion among the local chatterati around merits of various so-called ‘deals’.

In this light, he has sought to remind us of the Deadline Effect.

His recent tweets neatly define the concept;

14 Feb: the #deadlineeffect is a well known phenomenon in the theory and practice of #negotiations – ie, in any negotiation with a deadline, a deal, if one is struck, is struck close to the deadline.

01 Feb: the #deadlineffect is well established principle in #negotiation: in general, in any negotiation with a deadline, agreement, if one is reached, is reached at the ‘eleventh hour’… #Compromises will be made as we [get] closer to the deadline

27 Jan: [with] the #deadlineeffect … #Compromise is essential for success in any #negotiation – which ‘player’ compromises in what way lies at the core of any negotiation, but imagination and cooperation are required to achieve compromise.

Hearing airwaves awash with talk of redlines, concessions and stonewalling must surely remind us sellers to check our approach to the – in my experience – most regularly neglected module of Sales; negotiation.

Starting here with making plans for preventing deadline effect disaster will do no harm whatsoever.