Behavior Analysis
Research Tool - BART

Behaviour Analysis (BA) in negotiation is a science that seeks to understand how humans communicate in pursuit of mutually agreed outcomes.

Since the 1970s, BA, through direct observation, was successfully applied to analyzing a range of interactive skills. No single research methodology can provide a single set of definitive insights into such a complicated activity as negotiation, but what BA can do for the negotiation field is discover those communication behaviors that correlate with, and even cause, success.

In the 1980s, researcher Neil Rackham and his Huthwaite Research Group were financed by IBM and Xerox to study techniques used in sales negotiations. They trained researchers to classify, or “code”, verbal behaviours of 10,000 sales people in 35,000 negotiations. They observed and coded which questions were used most often by sales people and correlated them with successfully concluded sales.

By analysing this mass of data, the reseachers discovered that the most successful sales people did not push their products and services at customers, but engaged or “pulled” customers using questioning techniques. Analysing the most frequently asked questions enabled a radical but simple tool to be developed that increased successful outcomes. The tool was called SPIN – an acronym of Situation questions, Problem questions, Implication questions and Need or value questions. SPIN Selling became one of the world’s best-selling sales books and SPIN remains a widely used discipline. BA is therefore capable of producing exceptional results. Further discoveries and tools are possible from observational research of many other types of negotiation.

Most modern negotiation knowledge derives from the anecdotal experiences of scholars and trainers, often tested and refined in classroom settings involving students engaging in role plays and game theory. Few originated from systematic empirical research – that is, from expertly observed and objectively measured and analysed observations from real world negotiations involving real world parties who have stakes in the outcome. This is because researchers rarely gain access to negotiations in order to observe the interactions taking place.