Host: Philip Brown, Founder of The Negotiation Club
Guest: Luke Tomlinson, Procurement Professional
“Conditioning language isn’t just about setting expectations; it’s about sculpting the deal.”
Episode Overview:
In this thought-provoking episode, host Philip Brown sits down with Luke Tomlinson, a seasoned Procurement Professional with a background in Sales. Luke’s experience on both sides of the commercial fence provides a unique perspective on negotiation dynamics, making this episode particularly insightful for anyone eager to refine their negotiation skills.
NEGOTIATION MICRO-MOMENTS
The discussion centres on a “micro-moment” negotiation technique that listeners can practice and perfect: the concept of “Conditioning Language.” Luke explains how conditioning language plays a crucial role in setting the stage for successful negotiations by strategically shaping the expectations of the other party through the use of language, stories, and context right from the start.
D.I.S.C. PROFILES?
Luke, who identifies with a ‘Blue’ personality type as defined by the DISC assessment (emphasising logic and thorough preparation), advocates for using conditioning language to create an atmosphere of trust and mutual growth. He underscores the importance of careful planning and positive framing to establish a productive negotiation environment.
"FRAMING" IN NEGOTIATIONS
A significant point Luke discusses is the importance of “framing” within negotiations. Often, the other party might perceive a situation as low value or even negative. However, by positively reframing the situation and effectively “selling” it to the other party, you can lay the groundwork for a successful negotiation. This ability to reframe a situation can turn a potentially challenging negotiation into an opportunity for collaboration and positive outcomes.
AVOID ASSUMPTIONS
Philip Brown also highlights a crucial insight—there’s a common assumption that suppliers are always eager to sell, but as procurement professionals know, not all customers are treated the same. Larger customers might receive better discounts than smaller ones, even though it’s the smaller customers who may need the break more. This underscores the importance of not assuming the intentions of the other party without first testing them. By using framing in your conditioning language, you can explore and understand the true motivations and intentions of the other side, leading to more effective negotiations.
CONDITIONING LANGUAGE FOR DIFFERENT STYLES
Additionally, Luke emphasises the need to consider the personality style of the other person in the negotiation. Whether they have a “Blue,” “Red,” “Yellow,” or “Green” personality type, understanding these styles can significantly influence how you frame and deliver your conditioning language. The key takeaway is the necessity of adapting your approach to the possible styles you might encounter. Misjudging the other person’s style or failing to resonate with their perspective can derail the negotiation. Therefore, acute observation, active listening, and flexibility are essential to ensure your language aligns with the other party’s style, allowing you to reassess and adjust as needed.
This episode is not just about theory—it’s about practice. Luke’s insights on conditioning language, framing, and testing assumptions have inspired a new Negotiation Card, titled “Conditioning Language.”
This card is designed to help practitioners actively practice and refine their use of these techniques in various negotiation scenarios, with a keen awareness of the different personality styles they may face. The message is clear: practice is crucial—listening to the podcast is just the beginning, but real progress comes from applying these techniques in your own negotiations.
FOLLOW ... Never miss an episode and keep on learning!
Tune in to this episode to learn how to master conditioning language, framing, and understanding the other party’s intentions, and add these powerful tools to your negotiation toolkit.
We highly recommend anyone interested in building their negotiation skills to consider joining The Negotiation Club, starting their own club, or simply getting a deck of our Negotiation Cards to practice.
Remember, there is no progress without practice, and having the right people around you can elevate you to lofty heights!
Welcome to the Negotiation Club Podcast with Philip Brown. The Negotiation Club is the only community focused solely on enhancing your negotiation skills training through practice with others. Today on the podcast, Phil is joined by Luke Tomlinson to talk about conditioning language and how you can use it to set the expectations of the other party before making a proposal. Here's Phil and Luke. - Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Negotiation Club Podcast. This is the area where we talk to experts, practitioners, and other interested parties in the world of negotiation. And we like to understand some of the skills, techniques, and tactics that they use, and perhaps build them into our own practice arena. So we can actually take ownership of them as well. Now today, I am really happy to welcome you. I'll welcome you to listen to Luke Tomlinson. Now, Luke is a procurement professional, but also has come from a background of sales. So Luke, over to you. Do you wanna give a little introduction as to who you are? - Thanks, Phil, and thanks for having me. So yeah, Luke Tomlinson started off in sales support, so working with account managers, sort of working behind the scenes as such. And then yeah, progressed. Dumbled in accounts for a few months, and then yeah, ended up in procurement for the last four and a half, five-ish years. So yeah, that sort of may have started off in B2B distribution, so very much accountogram management structure, and I've since moved on to end-user telecoms sector. So a bit different. - Well, I've got 30 years in procurement, so having come from sales into procurement, I'm just wondering whether that's poacher-term, the gamekeeper, or perhaps gamekeeper-term poster. We always have this little bit of a knuckle fight between procurement and sales. But of course, the curious thing is, that even when it comes to those different roles, in negotiation, we are often using the same sort of skill sets. So tell me, what's your kind of approach when it comes to negotiations? Do you have a particular style of your own? - So for me, it's about framing opportunities. It's conditioning language as such. - Conditioning language, conditioning language, and framing. I like that. I often talk about conditioning language at the beginning of a negotiation. So if we are going into a negotiation, what are the considerations that you might pick up in terms of how are you going to condition the other party? So what kind of preparation might you be thinking of, and what are you going to do? - Well, I think for me, I'm a very data-driven person. So before going into a negotiation, I like to have the vaccine from my mate. But so what's the opportunity that we're going to present the supplier or the party? And having those facts in front of me. But I think as well as that, it's the people element. So it's, I think, depending who you pitch into, that's who you do. So you could have someone who's like, in terms of dispersonality, someone who's a red, someone who's a blue. I think it's looking at the individual. - I'm framing the language around who you're talking to. And combining that with what the data shows you. So the data could be the, you know, it's a really good opportunity for supplier. That's how I frame it. I'd frame it's a really good opportunity. If it's a situation where the leverage is probably not as good as you'd want it to be, you condition that language. You rework it and reframe the opportunity. So whoever you're approaching. You're still selling the opportunity. Even though at the time it might not present itself as an immediate win-win for them. - I like that. And the word you keep mentioning there is opportunity. So even though in your in procurement, you're selling the opportunity to the suppliers, to the sellers. - Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, from my short time in the field, I've sort of discovered that, you know, at the end of the day, suppliers don't have to do business with you. It's a two-way street. So while you want the best deals, you want the best terms, you want the best quality, et cetera, the supplier wants the best relationship. And, you know, as someone in procurement, I want the best relationship too. But it makes things a lot easier. But yeah, it's that opportunity for both parties, rather than just a one-way street. - Yeah. And you just said there that the supplier doesn't have to do business with you when you're talking from a procurement perspective. But of course, what's going through the supplier's mind is, hey, that procurement person doesn't have to do business with us either. So we've got that common pressure, ultimately, which is, the buyer's worried about the seller's wanted to do business, and the seller's worried about the buyer's wanted to do business. Now, I would imagine a lot of people listening here are thinking, well, surely a seller would like to sell no matter who it is. But have you got any examples where, okay, there might be selling, but there's a difference in the way that they're selling? - So, for example, one seller might be trying to, you know, might not be an incumbent. So they might be trying to convince us to buy an incumbent, you know, their product instead of an incumbent. So obviously, from their side, they're probably looking, well, how can I influence the buyer to buy our product? What, you know, it could be quality, it could be price point, it could be, you know, whatever point they're centering on, they're going to be, they're going to be focusing on something, whatever it is. And I think as a buyer, it's important to try and recognize, on the other end, what element they're trying to focus on. So sort of almost trying to read into them. And I think then that's the point as a buyer, you can look to leverage, say, for example, the supplier saying, well, I'll, I'll, I'll products better quality. And then, you know, reading into that as a buyer, go, okay, well, they're trying to sell it, that their selling point is quality. Then, for me, as a buyer, it's, well, how do I maximize the value? Yeah, I may acknowledge it's better quality. But then I'd focus on the point that they're not focusing on, like, well, you know, the current product we get is a lot cheaper, you know, it's a lot more cost effective than economical for us. But, you know, I appreciate the opportunity you're trying to, trying to pitch me. And then I think from the buyer's perspective, it's sort of taking their opportunity based on quality and going, well, there might be an opportunity for you if you can do something on price, for example, to make it more economical. So for me, it's focused on what opportunity they're trying to pitch. And then almost, almost in a way, countering it and framing, there is an opportunity there if you can see it a bit on, for example, price or payment terms. Yeah, what you just said about recognizing what they're saying, that really is about listening, listening, listening, listening. And it works both ways, come back to the point where you said at the beginning about conditioning. So it's conditioning is in many ways setting the expectations of the other party, even before you make that proposal, before you make that concession. And I think what I kind of find interesting here is that when you're going into the negotiation, obviously having your own mindset, your own mind, what you're trying to achieve, what you believe is important to the other person, and you're obviously having your own mind, what you believe is important to yourself, which again, we can go into a conversation about what is of value to the individuals. Now, I have an example many, many years ago, I sat in a negotiation with a colleague, and I literally wrote everything that they said down. I ended up with like three or four pages of eight, four, it was just nuts. Then what I did was I actually dictated it back into a word document, and then I went through and looked at some of the common themes and the common things that was said by the other party. And having done that, I started to identify from that supplier what it was that they were interested in. So the speed of delivery, they really wanted something very, very quickly. But it didn't come across simple knocks. Maybe it wasn't being transparent or thought through. So I had to literally write everything in order to identify that. But it was really an important lesson for me, knowing that they are saying something, but not necessarily being completely clear about it, transparent about it. But I think that's where we were talking. The suppliers know that the buyers might not want to do the business with them. And the buyers know that the suppliers might not want to do the business with them. So there is a real need to have that clarity as early as possible. Yeah. So I would go back to what you're saying here, which is about the need to articulate and set the expectations of conditions at the very beginning of the negotiation, rather than trying to be a fishing trip later on. So am I writing thinking that from your perspective, the opening statements, the conditioning language you use at the beginning, making something that's a negative or positive. If you can do that at the very beginning, that's going to help in our negotiations. Yeah, definitely. I think when you do it that way, you're setting the scene, really. And exactly what you said, you're setting the expectation. And I think it's almost like an opening pitch, really, from either side. And I think if you can lay the foundations of that at the very beginning, you're starting off on the rifle and you can sort of frame the opportunity for either side from there. Okay. So if we were to look at something or a technique that we can practice, because I'm always thinking about how do we take this and then practice it, the moment that we're looking to do here is the conditioning language. Yeah. So we're talking about the conditioning language we set at the beginning of a negotiation. That allows both parties to understand what the expectations are. And of course, the dangers are that you go in with a pre-prepared conditioning statement only to find that that is the wrong thing to say. So you need to be mindful of the flexibility. If I'm going to go in there and say, right, this is a situation and I've completely misread it, but that's what I'm starting off with. So it does need to be a balancing act between saying, this is the situation, but being open and having a back door to be able to adjust that as well. But the conditioning language is there. Yeah. Right. Okay. So, right. So Luke, what I'm thinking here now is that we have a Luke Tomlinson negotiation card. Okay. And we perhaps call it, I don't know, conditioning language. And we talk about the importance of setting the expectations, which you can do by preparation and planning beforehand, but temper that with the ability to actively listen and react in real time as well. So we can practice delivering our conditioning statements at the beginning, but then trying to adjust and understand whether the impact is having the right impact. Oh, I like that one. I like that one. All right. Sorry. And okay. So you've just mentioned, I'm going to go back. So this is what we're going to do, ladies and gentlemen. At the end of the day, we're going to be practicing from this one, conditioning language. It happens all around us. It does have an impact on us. So that's what we're going to be focusing on when we practice with the conditioning card. Now, I want to go back to Luke, because you did mention red and blue as a color scheme. Remind me, what are you referring to there? So with something I did recently, actually, is the dispersonality traits. So, okay. So, for example, I'm blue. I'm heavily, heavily blue. So we get blue, which is more logical, a bit more cautious and risk-averse, a bit more data oriented than you get red, which is a bit more direct. I think negotiation probably is often associated with red. And I think, yeah, red is a bit more direct. And then yellow and green sort of sit, yellow and green sit between. So yeah, yellow is a bit more outgoing, a bit more talkative, friendly. And then green is, it's similar to yellow in a way, but it's a bit more introverted. That's the way I'd describe it anyway. A bit more passive. Good listeners, though. Good listeners agree. You know what, you've made me think here because there is a really good friend of mine. In fact, there's a friend who came on one of the very first negotiation club cohorts, Kingsley. And I think Kingsley runs a company called Kinetic People. I'll put a link in there. And he literally does this disc profiling. It's really important. But the reason why I just highlighted that, because it made me recognized this conditioning language, the conditioning language is going to be both created by and delivered by an individual would perhaps a particular type. So as you say, a red individual, maybe more forthright, maybe more, you know, in your face, whereas a blue might be more focused on the opportunity and the numbers. I don't know about the yellow and green, but I could imagine they might be more emotional, tensed as wealth. So coming back to our conditioning card, the importance here, ladies and gentlemen, is that whatever you believe to be the conditioning language, don't be surprised that other people might see a completely different. We assume the other party is going to hear it the same the way they're seeing. But if I'm a blue person and I'm talking to a red person, what I'm saying might not actually be interpreted in the same way. But if I'm a blue talking to a blue, it might be, well, perfect. Yeah, you're talking my language. So just be mindful when you are preparing your conditioning remarks, when you are thinking about what you're saying, be mindful of the other party, be wary of how they may interpret this. So you need to make that little bit of connection beforehand. Right, listen, Luke, I've taken up a good chunk of your time here. So first of all, ladies and gentlemen, as you know, the negotiation club is where we practice our negotiation skills. So this is not just talking about it, not just listening about it. This is very much doing it as well. So if you've enjoyed listening to this, obviously do a follow, look out for more than. But also head over to the website where we've got these negotiation cards. And the whole purpose here is that you can listen to what Luke has said. You know, it can resonate. It might make it of interest. But more importantly, it's not just what Luke has said. It's how do I make Luke appear in my negotiation? And that you can do through negotiation cards. So pick up the conditioning card and try it in your next negotiation practice. So Luke, final words for you. Any additional pieces of wisdom or? I say from me, going back to that point, procurement is a very negotiation. I think in general is very people-oriented. People-oriented practice and going back to the disc element of it and how you frame those and how you react to other people going like, for example, like you said, someone who's a blue going into negotiation with the red. Actually, I listened to an audiobook recently where one of the elements they talked about with disc was how you can react to people with different discolours. So, for example, a red prefers more direct communication to prefer things shorter. So I'd say a word of wisdom for me would be when you're going into negotiation, because it's so people-oriented and people are so different. Be mindful of how you deliver your message and deliver and frame that opportunity, because everybody's different. And I think it is very much a learned skill, but once you're able to identify how, once you've built that relationship and you can identify how people react, it will make things so, so much easier. I got a feeling, Luke, that we need to have another conversation about the skill of identifying that. But, listen, Luke, thank you so much. I wish you a wonderful rest of your day and for the audience out there and the club members out there. As always, just keep on practicing. So long. Bye-bye. If you liked what you heard today, check out thenegotiationclubs.com, where you can find professional development courses, join negotiation club communities, purchase negotiation practice cards, get a private consultation, and more. Until next time, thanks for joining us and happy negotiating. (gentle music)
