Are You an Amateur Negotiator? Join Ben from Innovate Podcast and Darren A. Smith with their talk on how to become an effective negotiator. Learn useful tools like the squaredance for negotiating and disregard bad practices like running to PowerPoint first. Read on to discover the basics of effective negotiation that you can start using today. You Can Read the Full Transcript Below: Darren A. Smith: What else could we do? What could I explore? What do you want from me? Could we talk about a contract that's 50 years long? No, we can't, Darren. Alright, what about one's five years long maybe? Okay. Could we talk about improving the quality, and reducing the packaging? Could we work together on blah, blah, blah? There’re a million things we could talk about. Now. None of them might bridge the gap between a 10-pound case and an eight-pound case. But let's try. Ben: Welcome to the Innovate Podcast, a show where we discuss, dissect, and attempt to rebuild the world of product and category within consumer goods. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Darren a Smith a veteran of the grocery industry with over 3o years of experience, I think working either for retailers or advising manufacturers and brands. Darren and I briefly crossed paths as buyers and category managers at Sainsbury back in the very early naughts, which we may discuss in a moment. But Darren, welcome to the Innovate Podcast. Delighted you can join us. How are you? How are you today? Negotiating is a key business skill   Darren A. Smith: Hey, Ben. I'm good. We're in process of moving house, not today, but in the next couple of weeks, so I am struggling with that process. There's a reason it's stressful. Ben: So yeah, you just thought you'd add another huge seismic life event onto the already kind of generational economic challenges that we're facing. Darren A. Smith: That's absolutely true. I think we just squeezed in for the interest rates went through the roof. Ben: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not a joking matter actually. Yeah. Okay, cool. Good. So, Darren, just for the benefit of the listeners, I guess a natural place to start would just be to introduce yourself, talk through your kind of background from Sainsbury through to now and just talk about what you're focusing on with your current business MBM, if that's okay. Darren A. Smith: Of course. So I started Sainsbury in 1990 and at that point, I was the assistant. Now that's the important part. I was the assistant cottage cheese buyer. I wasn't even the real one. I didn't even know what cottage cheese was at the rightful age of 19. So that's where I started. Then I took on various buying roles for the next 13 years. My last real job was looking after the fruit team for Sainsbury, where I decided that actually I wanted to go and see if I could do something by myself, set up MBM, and ever since we've worked on soft skills training. Ben: Okay, awesome. Darren A. Smith: For the last past 20 years now. Ben: So soft skills training, I guess that could be quite broad. It's clearly focused on people. What are kind of the key areas that you focus on in terms of developing skills? Darren A. Smith: The key ones that people want are how do I get the most out of my time — time management. How do I get the most out of my people — people management, leadership skills, and how do I get the most out of my deals, particularly in the industry that you and I are in? So it's negotiation predominantly. It's time management and it's people management skills. They're the three. There are a number of other soft skills. The bit I really like is Jack Ma, recently the chairman of Alibaba said that with the progress of AI, soft skills is the only way forward. Love it. Ben: Right. Awesome. Darren A. Smith: Which is great. So we can try and process data really quickly and be analysts, but ultimately it's about how you and I interact about the teams we build and about how we lead people is the future.