Getting to yes: Successfully negotiating with your business partners
Presentation Abstract
Borrowing the title of Fisher and Ury’s popular work, this session suggests strategies and invites conversation around the challenge of negotiating with your business partners—no matter who they are in your organization. In today’s environment, our technical content organizations are continually asked to support additional services with fewer team members. But doing more with less simply isn’t always possible. Informing a business partner that you cannot support a request can spark a fraught conversation, but adding more to your plate might risk sending your team into overload. Even asking for trust in your decisions as the authority in your area can be tough. Yet these conversations don’t have to become uncomfortable, and can instead provide an opportunity for dialog leading to mutual gains. You can get what your team needs, draw boundaries, and inspire confidence at the same time.
What can attendees expect to learn?
Within the context of technical content’s organizational position and business value, this session will cover core negotiation strategies that achieve win-win outcomes and how to avoid zero-sum exchanges. Since relationships are key, we’ll discuss how to identify allies and when to call on them. Finally, we’ll address the inevitable question of data—seemingly irrefutable information that can turn opinion into hard fact.
Meet the Presenter
California born and raised, Jill attended UCLA where she received her B.A. in English, and then continued her studies at Boston University. Jill went on to teach at BU for seven years until the tech bug bit her. Technical content development made the most of Jill’s teaching experience as well as her skills in research and writing: Jill loves to learn new things and help people reach their goals. Five years into her technical writing career, Jill took leadership of a technical writing team at a Boston start-up. Management was another natural extension of teaching, championing staff members and motivating them to do their best work. Jill started at EMC almost four years ago, bringing with her a focus on customer experience and drive for simplicity. At DellEMC, Jill leads the global technical content development teams that support core storage.