Negotiation

“The willingness to walk away makes sure you optimize the outcome. When you negotiate, if you're fully vested in the outcome, you fold at some point in time saying, well, I can't let Harry Stebbings walk away because Harry walks away, I have no deal.”

“Price dropping is when you're making something cheaper or offering payment plans. You have to look a little uncomfortable while you're doing it. You can't just be like, oh, you can't afford it. We'll just do a thousand dollars cheaper, or, oh, no problem, we'l…”

“Haste equals risk. So as you slow down, oftentimes we wanna take a couple of days to respond, not to be a jerk or belligerent or to manufacture some fake urgency, but it shows a little scarcity and thought process to your time.”

“First thing you just have to remember, the best negotiators, they don't talk, they translate. I see salespeople all the time, employees trying to ask for more raises. They don't know what to do. They don't understand their value, and so they just talk. They ta…”

“What does winning look like to you? That's another great way and a great question to reframe a stalled negotiation, right? As you mirror them, you say, I totally understand why you're frustrated. I totally get it. Let's walk away. You pull and then you say, bu…”

“The urge to correct is so irresistible that we actually use it as one of our negotiation skills. I'll say something wrong on purpose. Because you will not be able to resist the urge to correct me with the truth. And it's a great way for me to trigger getting h…”

“If you're the most mercenary person in the world, and the only thing you care about is making money, then that's the fastest, easiest way to make the money.”

“Demonstrating understanding, not understanding, but demonstrated understanding in a way that the other side feels heard and draws them into telling you more, removes you as a threat. First move in a negotiation is to remove yourself as a threat, because why wo…”

“And the other side will tell you if they could trust you not to hurt them with it. So your first negotiation is trust. Cause they got stuff. If they could tell you it would change everything.”

“Well, if they've got proprietary information that would change everything, then your must haves and your giveaways could be completely wrong.”

“Especially whenever I was in the process of either raising money or selling my company, it was these very brief periods of time, maybe three weeks, four weeks, six, six weeks, where the value of my years of effort would swing by 50%, depending on how good I wa…”

“If I have as much information or more information, I'm always going to make the first offer because I know the power of anchoring. I'm not going to give that away to the other side, but if they know more than me and I know that, then I'm going to sit back, wai…”

“This is the way that you know whether or not your anchor is legit. So you need to be able to finish the sentence. I'm offering this because blank, and then you fill it in with objective and legitimate criteria. So objective, it comes from a third party legitim…”

“The person who moves first in a negotiation has an advantage. Because it, the first number changes everybody's view of what is considered plausible. So it moves things in that direction.”

“So, when I was teaching negotiations, I would say somebody does that to you, comes up with a number that's absurd. I would say, lose your temper. Make a scene. Say, I will not start the conversation from that number. It's an absurd number. I don't want to. Let…”

“And if you don't have money right now, and you don't know how to make it, one of the best ways to start is just to learn to negotiate things that you don't want to”

“No, I don't think it's ever necessary. I'm very much against it.”

“They're, they have been nurtured into assertion, but then when they, if they can blend assertion with the soft skills, then suddenly they're superstars.”

“How could I convince somebody who has more leverage across the table to do something That I want to do, and it was really by catering to their interests more than their sympathy or their fears. I had to find ways to make it worth their while to try to get them…”

“If I present you with a deal point, and you have an objection, ok, the reframe is to present you another option while addressing your objection, but still making the same request. I'm still getting the same point, right? That's a part of the negotiation.”

“You can say it in a way you can demonstrate understanding without agreement. This is the way it seems to you. I'm going to seem like a jerk. That doesn't say that you are. It's an awareness of the impact that you're going to have on the other side, based on th…”

“So I think the idea is if we go in and as our primary goal, say, I just, I really want to understand how you see the world and I want to help you understand how I see the world. And the secondary concern is persuasion. The secondary concern is winning the conv…”

“And when I would negotiate with the Israelis, like they would treat every issue like it was like a 10, you know what I mean? In the sense that like they just operate, like there's no margin for error.”

“In any negotiation, I believe in leaving a little bit on the table. And in any relationship, I believe in sharing the stakes. I've been doing deals with many of the same people for decades, because the goal is for us to all come out ahead.”

“Building strong relationships with the folks on the other side of the table. So getting to know them, breaking bread with them, building the goodwill that you knew you were going to need when it got down to the finer points that were going to be the toughest, …”

“When you're stuck and it's getting heated, the strategic pause is helpful. And you're actually just taking a break because it's no longer progressing. It's stuck and you got to shift the energy.”

“You see this classic mistake all the time, where people think they need to keep their cards close to their chest and, like, play it coy. Like, that is the worst way to do a deal. Because the truth is that, 99% of the time, there are two or three things that ma…”

“And the pros know the beauty of silence. And I think that's the biggest thing people mess up in the beginning is they talk themselves out of a deal.”

“The guy's just a weather vane for the blob and the foreign policy establishment. And so the weather vane is now pointing towards negotiations.”

“Number one thing in negotiations is outwork whoever you're negotiating with.”

“I never get emotional back and that gives me power, right? It gives me power to, because I'm regulated, They're unregulated and uncentered, and that means they make more mistakes than I would. And so if you could be a shock absorber to emotion in negotiations,…”

“The small talk stuff is fine, but it's, it sort of betrays a little naivete, like that you care, or they care, because if there's, you're in a serious negotiation, no one cares about that. They just care about, like, what you're trying to do.”

“Well, so often it's just silence. Just being silent. Saying, like you said, throwing out one of those open-ended statements and then just staying silent and holding the discomfort. And then often they will start to, you know, give on the price or whatever. And…”

“There's no way around the fact that negotiations is a perishable skill. There just isn't. And anybody, if you're not working at your communication skills, you're keeping your emotional intelligence up, it goes dormant. It doesn't go away. But it does go dorman…”

“When you're saying no to one of four things. You're saying no to either the terms, the price, the behavior, or the person.”

“Negotiations are really when there's some irrationality in a discussion. Otherwise it's a discussion. It's just somebody one person trying to make the other person see their point of view”

“Every single negotiation is a cooperation and a collaboration. But there's not a single time where I'm almost never, and really, you know, probably never, where the other person has to negotiate with you. They have some alternative. They can walk away, which m…”

“When you're negotiating a deal, sometimes taking the pause is very beneficial at the right time. I am usually a very fast person, fast decision person. I give answers straight away, but in negotiations, taking a walk to the balcony and taking the pause sometim…”

“And the problem with that is your decision will put a number on it. In other words, if you accept the deal, I guess it was good enough. And if you walk away, it wasn't good enough. And so your actions imply a price. On your values.”

“You don't want to be thinking about your value of commutes or relationships while a person has his hand extended to you. That's the worst time to be putting a value on your relationships because you'll either pay too much or even worse, too little.”

“All these useful things that would be probably good to have in a personality for a negotiator will pale in comparison to what she has, which is so clear. Massive information advantage.”

“What's bad about money in a negotiation, you have to deal with money. You have to talk about it. It's the thing. But what's bad about focusing on it first is it's a win-lose. What I mean is it's valuable to both of us.”

“What's really great about the contingent agreement is it can cool the emotions thusly. We don't have to fight about the future. We just agree on what happens if you're right, and we agree on what happens if I'm right, and if you structure the contract sensibly…”

“The cheesy descriptor of it is, I like to say, sell the deal makers, not the deal breakers. In other words, you don't say, give me EVP or I'm not coming, Ted. There's always some bargaining zone where there's the high ended and the low end of it. And people of…”

“I see two that ironically young, inexperienced negotiators don't walk away enough.”

“So what I often say is walk away, but when you do, you have to pave a path for graceful reentry.”

“People, when they're planning, they plan for everything to go right, and what you gotta do is kind of unpack all the ways this could go longer than you think. The last minute is many nights before, so when you prepare for your negotiation person, That's why yo…”

“The person who moves first in a negotiation has an advantage. Because it, the first number changes everybody's view of what is considered plausible. So it moves things in that direction.”

“That negotiation is not about trying to convince the other guy. It's about trying to understand them. So again, it's slowing yourself down, it's not doing what comes naturally, because trying to convince them is applying pressure. Arguments, promises, and thre…”

“Teaching itself is a negotiation. You are negotiating for people's engagement and willingness to take risks and to admit mistakes and to see what they have to learn”

“You're trying to teach them what we would call second position skills. Can you step into someone else's shoes and imagine what the world looks like to them and what they care about and what their priorities are? And not that you're supposed to guess accurately…”

“The discipline of listening, I have come both through the podcast and through experience to realize there is sort of a body of knowledge, just like, you know, if you take algebra, you need to learn certain principles to understand how to do algebra. Listening …”

“While many of us think about a negotiation as an exchange of statements, Chris Voss explains that it's much more powerful to ask open-ended questions and let the other side go first. This allows you to gain access to the other person's mind, which is crucial i…”

“They're almost certainly better at you in negotiation. So if you do get into a negotiation, a deep negotiation, the one thing you have on your side is you can delay.”

“Real good negotiation is real good emotional intelligence, and I like taking a deep dive into people and connecting with them.”

“The real issue with any deal is implementation. It's not agreement. Yes is nothing without how. I can give you fake yeses all day long, and you're never going to get what you wanted.”

“You've got to get rid of the negative before you can go to the positive. Sometimes the negative getting rid of it will be so powerful that you don't even have to pitch the positive because the other side's going to go ahead and pitch it for you.”

“Make a list of the stuff you want to deny. And instead of denying it, cause denying things makes it worse. Just pull it out, you know, and say, look, you know, I know that my industry has a reputation for being fast talking salesman.”

“The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don't know you're in. So first of all, anytime the word yes is in your, is in the air, somebody's trying to get a yes out of somebody or something, you're in a negotiation. Or if I want is in your brain you're in a…”

“The commodity that's in each and every negotiation is time, not price, not money. Dollars are not always involved, but time always is.”