“Getting (More of) What You Want”: Five Tips for Better Negotiations

Margaret Neale and Thomas Lys, professors at Stanford and Northwestern, respectively, and authors of “Getting (More of) What You Want,” keynoted the final morning of Conversations That Win. Below are five negotiation nuggets from their presentation:

Set an aspiration – If you’re going to get more of what you want, you have to have an aspiration, i.e., an optimistic assessment of what you could achieve in a given negotiation. This is necessary due to a simple but powerful psychological process, distilled in the following maxim: Expectations drive behavior. If you’re just focusing on your safety net—your worst possible outcome—that’s where your deal will probably end up.


Don’t just negotiate the easy stuff first – Most people take an issue-by-issue approach in negotiations, usually electing to address the simple issues first and the harder ones later. This isn’t a good strategy, and that’s because, according to Neale and Lys, it’s related to a particularly insidious problem: Assuming your counterpart’s easy issues are also yours. Negotiations are seldom symmetrical. If you’ve solved all your easy issues and all your counterpart’s hard issues first, then you’re going to be left with little leverage later to solve your hard problems favorably.


Don’t reveal your bottom line – And don’t ask for it either. It’s neither a good question to ask nor a good one to answer. Rather than posing this question to a prospect, which usually elicits a bad faith answer anyway, you should aim to triangulate their bottom line by determining what alternatives they have if you don’t strike an agreement. From this information, you’ll be able to extrapolate that number and avoid the bottom line dialogue.


Don’t agree unequivocally to sub-agreements – This is the negotiator’s equivalent of “crossing the Rubicon, and needless to say, it’s not advisable crossing back to the other side. Revisiting a sub-issue that your counterpart thought was resolved comes across as an aggressive tactic, one that could potentially alienate them and put the kibosh on your deal. So, instead of agreeing to an issue you might need to renegotiate later, agree tentatively to each chunk as they come. According to Lys and Neale, the only time you should say “yes” is when agreeing to the entire package.


Include different types of issues in sub-packages – When bundling in negotiations, you need to include at least three issues. These issues should be a combination of “zero sum” issues (distributive)—where one side wins and the other loses—and issues where there is asymmetry in preferences (integrative).