Name: How to Negotiate in English - Business English Lesson
Uploaded: 2020-10-23T22:41:11.000Z
Duration: 18 min 53 s

In this lesson, you can learn useful language for business negotiations.

You'll learn how to make your position clear, how to accept or reject the other side's

proposals, and how to express yourself in clear, professional-sounding English.

If you haven't already seen them, I suggest you watch our videos on chairing and attending

Negotiations are also a kind of business meeting, and the language from those videos will also

Don't forget that you should also visit our website: Oxford Online English dot com.

You can find many free English lessons, and also book lessons with one of our professional

In this lesson, you'll see a scenario where I'll role-play a purchaser for a clothing

Daniel will role-play the manufacturer's representative, and we'll be negotiating

I've read your proposals, and I understand you're looking for unbranded clothing in

Meaning: t-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, zip-up tops, and long-sleeved tees, right?

So, my first question is: what kind of volumes are we looking at?

Well, we're a reseller, so we rebrand the clothing and sell it on to retailers.

We can potentially move quite a lot of product, but I suggest starting small and scaling up

We're thinking of starting with around 500 to 1500 units per SKU, with more in popular

We'd prefer to keep things flexible to begin with.

I'm not against flexibility, but logistics require a certain amount of forward planning.

Let me ask you something: what's the situation regarding production and delivery?

How long does it take you to process orders?

It's not completely fixed, but around two weeks.

That's fine, so here's our situation: we don't have a lot of warehousing space.

That means we can't commit to a fixed schedule for deliveries.

Instead, we'll have to make orders once our stock level is low enough and we have

One thing you should know: we won't be able to offer the lowest prices if we can't be

sure of your delivery schedule in advance.

And for one product category, for example short-sleeved t-shirts, how many variations

We need all the common sizes, from XS to XXL, each in 16 colours.

At the beginning of a negotiation, both sides need to make their position clear.

In the dialogue, you saw several ways to do this.

First, you can state what you want directly, like this: 'I suggest starting small and

'We're thinking of starting with around 500 units per SKU.'

'We'd prefer to keep things flexible to begin with.'

For example: 'I suggest a six-month contract to begin with.'

'We're thinking of opening new branches in 15 cities.'

'We'd prefer to do the marketing work ourselves.'

You can also ask the other side specific questions to find out what they need.

In the dialogue, you heard: 'What kind of volumes are we looking at?'

'What's the situation regarding production and delivery?'

Again, you could use these in different situations.

For example: 'What kind of schedule are we looking at?'

'What's the situation regarding minimum order volume?'

Finally, you can also use open-ended questions to check information, or to get more information

from the other side, like this: 'What do you have in mind exactly?'

Making a question by leaving a sentence unfinished, with the word 'or' at the end, is conversational.

However, in spoken English, it's an effective way of showing that you need more information,

and that you want the other person to finish the idea.

Very often, negotiations depend on setting conditions.

What *you* can offer depends on what the other side can do.

OK, so if we're ordering around 100,000 units at one time, what kind of per-unit pricing

That depends if you can commit to a regular delivery schedule or not.

Assuming that you need a flexible schedule, we could offer six dollars per unit for tees

and tank tops, and fifteen for hoodies and zip-ups.

If we need higher volumes, would you be able to go lower?

Possibly, but the schedule is more important to us.

Supposing you could commit to a minimum monthly volume, we could go down to five-fifty and

If we commit to a minimum volume over a six-month period, but with a flexible delivery schedule,

As long as there were some limitations on the delivery timing, I think that would be

The easiest way to express conditions is with if-sentences.

For example: 'If we're ordering around 100,000 units at one time, what kind of per-unit

If we need higher volumes, would you be able to go lower?'

If-sentences can be used in many ways; it's common to use the modal verbs 'will' 'can'

'could' or 'would' on the other side of the sentence.

Let's make some more examples: 'If we commit to a longer contract, can

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to Negotiate in English - Business English Lesson

assume

commitment

situation

period