Negotiation Agenda Strategies for Bargaining With Buying Teams

A theoretical framework for selecting negotiation agenda strategies is developed for the common situation in which a single sales person is faced with bargaining with multi-functional buying teams. Two key strategic decisions regarding agenda setting, namely, the use of simultaneous versus sequential negotiation agendas, and the order of importance in which multiple issues should be bargained in sequential negotiations are examined. Based on this foundation, hypotheses concerning the profits, satisfaction, bargaining styles, negotiation time, and likelihood of reaching an agreement that result from these choices are presented. These hypotheses are then tested using a laboratory setting to simulate face-to-face negotiations. The findings suggest that in multi-issue, multi-buyer negotiations a simultaneous bargaining of the issues raises the perceptions of power by the buyers but still provides more integrative, satisfying, and timely agreements to both parties compared to using a sequential ordering of the issues. In sequential negotiations, the ordering of the relative importance of the issues to the parties is found to affect their pre-negotiation dispositions, the seller's subsequent bargaining styles, and the eventual likelihood of reaching an agreement. Managerial implications of these research findings are drawn and contrasted with conventional wisdom, indicating the need for salespeople to rethink a number of commonly held beliefs.