Negotiation Basics
Before engaging in any negotiation, it's important to determine first if it's even worth the time and effort. If so, then engage, armed with the knowledge that there are three dimensions to consider in any negotiation:
Power
Who has the power in this setting? is this power perceived? real? can I exert authority and power myself in this situation? am I speaking with someone who can make changes or should I go up? Where does the claimed authority come from, anyways? Is authority itself negotiable or is it set in stone(a sign? a rule of law?).
Time
When should you begin negotiating? at the start? or should you treat negotiation as a process where you get the other party increasingly invested in you, and only after you've secured their involvement do you make the actual request? That's right!
Information
What do you know about the other party? What do they know about you? What kind of information do they know that will give them advantage over you and what are you going to wanna to know about them to gain advantage over them?
Conceivably, when we play along the three axes: time, power, and information, and treat the negotiation as a process, the outcome favors us more, and we're able to disarm any perceived power or negotiation tricks(take a negotiation trick to the extreme or mock it if someone else uses it on you, like won't you look at this guy!, he's really good at his job, see what he did here, motioning to his colleague: "amazing". Now, say, salesman, back to our situation here, if I..)
But hold on a second, are we missing something here? you bet your bottom dollar we are! We also need to be someone the other party identifies with. A flesh-and-blood human being with needs to be satisfied just like their own.
In essence, you have the highest probability of winning a negotiation when you play the time, information, and power cards, and sprinkle the air with some of your own humanity(as opposed to presenting yourself as a statistic, or fighting on behalf of an abstract concept like a big corp, which the human mind can not identify with.) Your goal is to play a win-win game that satisfies both party's needs and avoid making visceral opponents along the way, and thus embody a collaborative spirit that wins at any negotiation.