Negotiating With The Savvy Buyer.

Allison P. Iantosca, Contributing Editor

Just the word negotiation conjures up images of long conference room tables, heavy dark suits, furrowed brows, poker faces, a winner and a loser. The loser fails to play the game, is weaker and doesn't want the win badly enough. The winner uses words like weapons and can outwit a bulldog. I'm not usually the winner in these situations. I'm either the super duper compromiser (also known as the loser) or the out and out loser because I can't get the synapses between my brain and my mouth to work quickly enough when the firing squad comes at me with heavy artillery.

A few months back, I met the heavy artillery in person. He actually didn't wear a dark suit -- rather a patterned button down shirt and snazzy pants as is the style these days. But his furrowed brow was polished by two years of business school, and his poker face perfected by five years in private equity. In comparison, I was a few threads less than au couture and about seven years behind in Harvard Business School case studies. Yet somehow, I found myself head to head with this savvy homeowner negotiating the contract for the $2 million-plus renovation he wanted to do on his property in Boston.

In the six weeks, four days and three hours it took for us to come to a signed document, I shaved at least a year off of any required MBA credits. The wounds are freshly healed, and the mistakes still quite obvious to me, but I learned more from this real life experience than any book I have ever read.

First I learned about the savvy buyer -- the type who wants to keep you on edge. This buyer pre-negotiates and then negotiates again. He acts rushed. He always wants to sign his legal documents, not yours. He sets someone up between you and him -- a lawyer or a professional (the architect in my case) -- to act as the good cop or coach to get information from you, and, usually in dramatic fashion, he takes the deal away at least once.

By the book, my guy used every single one of these moves on me and, in the beginning, had me wishing I were walking on hot coals with bare feet because anything would have been better than sweating it out in a ...