The Rational Strategies of the Players

In a difficult situation, establishing a winning strategy depends on anticipating the strategies of the other players.

Imagine that you have submitted your best offer and the buyer tells you over the phone, “I’d prefer to speak frankly. The deal is about to slip through your fingers. We’ve taken into account each supplier’s strengths and weaknesses and your proposal seems uncompetitive. You will need to make a major price adjustment to get back into contention. The decision will be made within 2 weeks. It’s up to you.”

What should you do? You need to develop a strategy. You start by trying to assess each player’s logical strategy.

Strategy is the way in which each player mobilizes his resources and deals with his constraints to achieve the objective. Strategy can be sophisticated and calculating, particularly when used by professional negotiators. Yet certain players have an “unconscious” strategy that they apply without even thinking about it.

Each player will adopt a rational approach, in accordance with his particular strategy, as the following examples demonstrate:

• The strategy of the logistics manager is to build a consensus to draw up a set of specifications based on the existing facilities.
• The strategy of the packaging workshop supervisor will probably be to use the tests to favor the most flexible equipment and then negotiate with his workforce to persuade them to accept the end of manual calibration.
• The workers’ strategy will be either to influence the tests to ensure that automatic calibration equipment is rejected or to negotiate some recompense from their workshop supervisor for their loss of job satisfaction.
• The strategy of the quality director is to identify the easiest standard to apply universally and then “sell” it to the plant manager.
• The manager of the German plant will deploy a strategy designed to show the buyer and other influential people just how efficient his solution is, while not directly addressing the plant manager, who views him as a rival.
• The strategy adopted by the technical manager of the maintenance company will be to raise worries about new types of equipment in the minds of his regular work contacts.
• The plant manager’s strategy will involve using the buyer to his own ends: It is her job to negotiate the best possible deal with suppliers, but it is primarily the job of those with technical skills to identify the most appropriate solution.
• The buyer’s strategy will be to seek out allies: She has something to prove but is isolated and lacks experience in this field. She therefore needs help in identifying at least two acceptable suppliers that will be approved by the plant manager and the packaging workshop supervisor.
• The strategy of the buyer’s PA is to pass all relevant information on to her colleagues, whenever possible showing how useful the purchasing department is, while gathering feedback and noting the different managers’ expectations.
• The strategy of the customer’s main customer will be to demand better service, while threatening to make fewer purchases and maybe simultaneously encouraging other suppliers to invest so as to pick up all the business in future.
• The strategy of your competitor Manuland will be to rely on its natural allies (the packaging line workers and the maintenance company manager) to win other potential allies (the logistics manager, the purchasing department, etc.).
• The strategy of your competitor Killer plc will be to convince the packaging workshop supervisor of the benefits of its solution in order to subsequently convince the plant manager by stressing how much better this solution is than that deployed by his colleague in Germany.