Where to negotiate?

I’ve been asked many times where should we hold negotiations? Should we travel to the negotiating party’s offices, maybe our office or alternatively an offsite neutral venue or remotely? And my answer is well it depends! there are advantages and disadvantages to each of these options. The starting point for evaluating the correct strategy is asking yourself a number of key questions, for example:

1. Do I need a key executive to step into the room as part of our strategy?

2. Do I want to prevent our counterparts from using their home ground to their advantage, in the manner of cutting the negotiation short or making us wait in the lobby until the meeting starts, or for us to arrive tired after a long drive or flight?

3. Do you want to have the psychological advantage of them coming to you, in other words saying I have the advantage, you need my business more then I do?

4. Do I want to have a specific room set up that I can only have if we meet at our offices?

As illustrated the list of why’s is long and for each negotiation you need to re-evaluate the situation, one of my best practices is to plan out the entire negotiation process in advance, and for each round of negotiation to set out clear goals, based on those goals to decide on the venue, for example, if I’m negotiating an agreement with a UK customer and I’m in the US, I might initially plan for the first round of negotiations to be at there offices, in order to show goodwill and the importance of the relationship, as this is only the first round I have nothing to lose potentially, for the second round I might choose to use a video conference or a neutral ground venue and as part of reciprocity on their side, invite them over for the 3rd and maybe final round of negotiations to our offices, thus creating an atmosphere of closure and also getting them to go the extra millage to our offices sets a firm commitment on there side to get the deal done.