Effective negotiation is collaborative

Pop culture taught me to think of negotiation as basically a game of chicken: demand what you want and threaten to walk away if you don’t get it. As such, I have tried to avoid negotiation as much as possible in life.

But my friend Conner Burt (Lessonly’s first salesperson and now President) taught me a different perspective. Try to meet the other party’s needs by discovering things you need that they don’t really care about. For example, if you’re selling to someone and they ask for a discount, it’s sub-optimal for you to cave, and threatens the deal to say no. But maybe cash flow is more important to you than overall profit; you might offer that discount if the other party is willing to pre-pay up front. In short:

1. Figure out what matters to you.
2. Discover what matters to the other party.
3. Find ways to give each other what matters.

Good negotiation can be a far more empathic, collaborative process than the macho, adversarial way it’s often represented.

As the book Pebbles of Perception (based on the thinking of Warren Buffet’s business partner Charlie Munger) puts it: successful negotiators seek bigger pies, not bigger slices.