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(CNN) -- The ability to negotiate, a skill that can be taught, is a highly prized talent for the international business traveler who brokers sensitive deals overseas.
The art of negotiaiton is now a popular topic in some MBA programmes, since the consequences of bad skills in this area can reflect negatively on your job and your firm.
Before starting any negotiation calculating the goals is essential, including what you are and what you are not prepared to compromise and be flexible on.
"Flexibility means that you should go into the negotiation with your goals and your bottom line all set -- you should try a lot of different things to achieve your goals," Madan Pillutla, a lecturer in negotiation and bargaining at the London Business School told CNN.
"A good negotiator will not be flexible about the bottom line. A good negotiator will walk away from the deal (rather) than actually breach the bottom lines they have set."
Regardless of personal style there are some things every negotiator should do, even before the meeting begins -- preparation is the first step.
This allows an understanding of the situation and the ability to know what you and the other party want to achieve from the negotiating process.
"Get the other person to like you -- this is a very important skill," explains Pillutla.
"Good negotiators have the ability to ask wonderful questions. When they ask these questions, people tend to answer them -- they then get a lot of information from these answers."
Pillutla believes silence or pauses can also work in your favor.
Those people that use gaps in a conversation to ask questions is another way of getting information from a meeting.
"Never lie in a negotiation, most people do not have perfect memories and if you want to be an effective liar, you have to have a perfect memory otherwise you can get caught up in your lies," says Pillutla.
In many business deals maintaining good relationship is important, even after a deal has been agreed upon. Pillutla suggests never loosing your cool.
"You would use aggressive tactics in situations where relationships are not important -- that is about the only place where you would use it," he explains.
-- CNN's Leone Lakhani contributed to this report.
