Negotiating Skills

Last week I attended a workshop sponsored by the Long Island Association on negotiating skills. I thought the program would be about labor negotiations, what the presenter would call a "forced action" negotiation that must end in some achievement or plan. But this was not the case. The workshop was about sales negotiations,where there is no forced action. Someone can try to sell a product, but the buyer may or may not end up buying. At first, I thought the program wouldn't be applicable to me as a librarian. But then as I listened more carefully, I thought about the uses of negotiating skills as a "seller" of library services.

The presenter said that people buy benefits, not features. A feature is what things are; a benefit is what they do. A library has all types of information, a feature. The information can be used to help people answer questions or find something to read, watch a video, gather for a book discussion, all benefits.

People also buy relationships and value. As librarians, we know the "value" and the "benefits" of building relationships with our customers. We know that the values of a library are both tangible and intangible. If we build a library building, they may not come. But if we build relationships through our reference interviews, programs, and ability to give patrons what they want when they want it as opposed to what we think they need, they probably will come again and again.