By now, you should be familiar with the idea that most of what we call “negotiating” is happening beneath the surface. As a skilled negotiator, your task is to identify, articulate, and ultimately use your counterpart’s hidden wants and irrational blind spots to your advantage. When you do this, you are making their reality conform to what you want them to give you.
What you need to do is reframe their view and alter their reality. You show them that by helping you achieve your desired solution, they will satisfy their own hidden wants. Ultimately, you are using their instincts to your advantage. There are three main ways to do this.
Before we dive into how you can use the above tactics to alter someone’s expectations and needs to make them work to your advantage, we should address the subject of “win-win” negotiating.
Win-win is based in compromise. It stipulates that negotiating counterparts should just look for common ground and seek terms that they can both live with. Why does this idea have so much currency?
Because we’re taught from an early age to compromise, meet in the middle, split the difference. Compromise helps us avoid the hard work of actual negotiating. It’s much easier just to split the difference than it is to really put in the effort to build a deep connection with the other person. Instead of figuring out what makes someone tick and using it to your advantage (which we’ll explore below), you can just accept half-a-loaf and move on.
But it’s more than that: win-win doesn’t just diminish the potential gains you could make, it can also lead to catastrophic losses. Think about a kidnapper who demands a $150,000 ransom for a hostage. Win-win negotiators would tell you to offer them $75,000 and hope that the kidnapper will just accept this and release the hostage. Of course, this would probably lead to the worst-case scenario, where you pay the money and the hostage isn’t released!
Obviously, this is not a tenable strategy. And the reason it fails is because some negotiations really are win-lose. In a win-lose, a win for the other side can only mean a loss for you. In these scenarios, applying a naïve, compromise-based win-win approach satisfies no one and often leads to disaster.
The lesson is to lean in to the difficult work of negotiating. Find out what’s really driving your counterpart: what do they want to achieve, what pressures are they facing, what do they consider to be fair or unfair? These aren’t easy questions to answer, but they will ultimately yield better results for you. The best solutions are always the product of risk, annoyance, confusion and conflict.
Deadlines are always a source of anxiety in negotiations. We feel that we will lose out on an opportunity if we don’t make a deal right away, or that these terms will never be available again.
Your counterpart will use deadlines to put pressure on you to make a deal. This is the essence of high-pressure sales tactics, when a salesperson tells you that a deal is for “a limited-time only” or that a product is “only available on a first-come, first-serve basis.” These deadlines compel you to suspend your rational judgement, ignore the pros and cons, brush aside questions of whether or not you even need the item in question, and, ultimately, rush headlong into a bad decision.
But deadlines can work both ways. You can also use them to your advantage, whether you’re facing one externally or imposing one on someone else.
Here’s the thing about deadlines: they’re mostly fake. Deadlines are almost always arbitrary, flexible, and rarely trigger the dreaded consequences people fear they will. What they really exist to do is force people to compromise with themselves in order to meet them.
A lot of old-school negotiation theories tell you to never reveal your deadline, otherwise you’ll give the other side an opportunity to run out the clock and delay discussion of the issues until the very end: putting you under pressure to make a deal on their terms.
This is also wrong. You want to reveal your deadline to your counterpart. Doing so reduces the risk of impasse and forces the other side to get down to negotiating immediately.
As long as you’re committed to not negotiating against yourself to meet the deadline, this can work to your advantage: you can flip the table and force them to accommodate your deadline. Remember, a missed deal for you is also a missed deal for them. There’s no reason for you to be the only one feeling the pressure.
As a good negotiator, you also need to use their deadline to your advantage. For example, car dealers are known for making generous offers when their reviews are up at the end of the month. They have to meet sales quotas, so they have a powerful incentive to close the deal on your terms.
People are powerfully guided by their notions of what is and isn’t fair. People’s quest for fairness and their desire to reject unfairness can lead them to irrational choices. Knowing this can be a powerful advantage for you in negotiating.
What do we really mean when we deem something to be fair? In negotiations, there are actually three uses of the term - two of them are underhanded tricks, and one sets the stage for open negotiation.
Fairness In Action: The Proposer/Accepter Game
The author gives an anecdote about the Proposer/Accepter Exercise he plays with his students. He splits the class into pairs, each consisting of a “Proposer” and an “Accepter.” At the start of the exercise, the Proposer is given $10 and the Accepter is given $0. They are tasked with working out an arrangement to divide the money between them in round dollar increments. They both get nothing if they cannot agree on an allocation of the money.
What’s instructive is how wildly divergent everyone’s notion of what a “fair” split is. No particular split gets chosen more than any other.
With an exception - there are very few $9/$1 Proposer/Accepter splits, even though this is the most “rational” division. After all, it’s the split most favorable to the Proposer and it’s still $1 more than the Accepter has before the game starts: it actually would be a classic “win-win.” That no one chooses this is an elegant demonstration of how negotiation is driven more by people’s subjective and emotional notions of fairness than of any sort of rational best-interest calculation.
Just as you want to position yourself as being a fair and reasonable counterpart, you also want to frame your position such that it satisfies their deeper, truer need. What are the emotional drivers behind what your counterpart really values? What do they want, what are they afraid of? Answering these questions requires looking under the surface.
The products and services we purchase are often about satisfying some deeper, more intrinsic need. When a couple hires a babysitter, what they’re really buying isn’t childcare: it’s a fun, stress-free night out as adults.
Makers of luxury products like sports cars and jewelry understand this principle very well: they make exclusivity and rarity the focus of their advertising campaigns, because they know that their customers are largely driven by the need to assert their status through owning and displaying these products.
We evaluate risks and rewards largely based on how they’re presented to us. If you’ll recall, this is known as the framing effect. One of the most powerful manifestations of the framing effect is loss aversion. In short, people are motivated more by fear of loss than hope of equal gain.
A related idea known as the certainty principle makes people more drawn to options that they perceive as being a sure thing than those they perceive as being risky.
Knowing this, you can put yourself in a strong negotiating position by framing your preferred solution as one that is safe, secure, and prevents your counterpart from incurring a loss.
We hear this from salespeople all the time when they say things like, “I just wanted to give you the opportunity to take advantage of this offer before it goes away.” This is why deadlines are so powerful: they create a sense of urgency that triggers your sense of loss aversion. When presented with the possibility of a loss, you’re no longer thinking of gaining something: you’re thinking about losing out on a deal.
When you’re trying to trigger loss aversion in your counterpart, you want them to think of the glass being half-empty rather than half-full.
Here’s how you can use your knowledge of framing effects to lead your counterpart toward the conclusion you want.
1. Anchor their emotions through an accusation audit that acknowledges all of their fears. By preparing them for a loss, you’ll trigger their loss aversion and make them work hard just to avoid it. This also helps frame your offer as being better than worse alternatives.
2. Let the other side go first. You don’t know enough about what you’re buying or selling to make an informed offer right away, so use their offer as a starting point.
3. If you’re negotiating something with a monetary value, establish a range. Base it on historical examples or what the figures in comparable deals look like. Be sure to use a bolstering range (where the low number is actually what you’d want).
4. Be open to non-monetary terms like recognition and perks. These are often small add-ins that cost your counterpart nothing but can make all the difference to you.
5. Use odd numbers. Psychologically, an odd number sounds like a product of precise calculation, even if it’s completely arbitrary. Your counterpart is far more likely to take a number like $41,972.37 seriously than $40,000 (which sounds like a placeholder or just a negotiating platform).
6. Surprise your counterpart with a gift. This can be a simple conciliatory gesture that costs you little. This engenders goodwill and triggers their natural emotional need for empathy and reciprocity. People feel the need to repay kindness with kindness.