Start with No: The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don't Want You to Know

by Jim Camp

It is absolutely imperative that you as a negotiator understand the importance of this point. You do NOT need this deal, because to be needy is to lose control and make bad decisions.

While needy negotiators raise their voices, negotiators under control lower their voices. So lower your voice in times of inner turmoil. Slow down.

I wasn’t needy. She was. But if she had been a Camp-trained negotiator, she’d have asked me (setting aside the language problem), “Who are these for?” When I answered she would have whistled and said, “Why would you want to spend so much money on them? A lot of money for grandparents.” She would have shown no need while building my need. She’d have laid a guilt trip on me—Money’s not a factor when it comes to my grandparents!—and I’d have paid 1,000 piastres, or darned close to it, because I really loved my grandparents.

When someone has tried to close on you too quickly—and someone has, in one context or another, unless you’re still a babe in arms—you instinctively reacted in the negative. Nothing, but nothing, will blow a negotiation faster than such a rush to judgment. Why? You had a vision of neediness, which makes anyone feel uncomfortable emotionally, and which also serves as a warning to look closer at this deal.

As a negotiator aspiring to excellence, you must, at all costs, avoid showing need.

By letting your adversary be a little more okay, you start to bring down barriers. By allowing him to feel in control, you, like Columbo, are actually in control.

When your adversary feels unokay, the barriers go up much faster than you can break them down. But unokayness on your part breaks down barriers—like magic, often.

The next time you find yourself in a situation in which your “adversary” is maybe just a little standoffish or doubtful, try being a little less okay. Pretend your pen has run out of ink and ask to borrow one for a moment.

In a negotiation, decisions are 100 percent emotional. Yes, 100 percent.

because facts do not win negotiations. Facts come later, because they mean nothing to the stomach.

“A negotiation is an agreement between two or more parties, with all parties having the right to veto.”

How much money do I have to leave on the table in order to maintain this relationship?

Take responsibility for the bad decision, learn from it, embrace the failure, and soldier on without fear because you are only one decision away from getting back on track.

If you’re not working on behalf of your own mission and purpose, you’re working on behalf of someone else’s.

Mission and purpose can be the most powerful single card you hold in your hand.

Goals you can control, objectives you cannot. By following your behavioral goals, you get to your objectives.

goal. What you can control is behavior and activity, what you cannot control is the result of this behavior and activity.

I’m thinking specifically of begging for an appointment—an extremely common error in all fields of business,

Be sure you understand this. Be sure you don’t cold-call or do the equivalent if you have a legitimate payside activity waiting.

Negotiators have been taught for decades to ask open-ended questions, and interrogative-led questions are simply one type of open-ended questions.

There seems to be a human impulse to help people answer our questions. We start off with a good interrogative-led question but then answer it for the adversary, or at the least throw out possible answers. I ask, “What is the biggest challenge you face?” and before you have a chance to answer I add, “Is it the national economy or your local labor problems?” One mistake on top of another: We answered the question for our adversary and in doing so our interrogative-led question turned into a verb-led question.

ASKING GOOD QUESTIONS is the highest octane fuel we have.

When the going gets tough in a negotiation, your biggest challenge will be your ability to nurture your adversary in spite of everything else going on.

Your job is to get information from the adversary by asking questions, not to provide information by answering questions.

never answer an unasked question; don’t interpret a statement as a question; and never reply to random statements.

The fuel “3+” (pronounced “three plus”) is simple and important. What is it? Nothing more than the ability to remain with a question until it is answered at least three times, or to repeat a statement at least three times.

Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. One, two, three times.

Avoid both the strongly negative and the strongly positive by staying in the calm neutral range, which is where we find the deals that stick. This is totally contrarian negotiating. You mean we don’t want the adversary to get all excited about this deal? No, we don’t, because the excitement won’t last; those inevitable second thoughts will come along sooner or later.

By nature, we humans are chock-full of expectations and assumptions. As a negotiator, you must learn to recognize them and set them aside.

In a recent negotiation I coached, the other team said they needed our best price on thirty-three thousand units. Everyone at the table knew that the going price for this expensive widget was somewhere around $1,000 per. The adversary told my client that although they had other suppliers for this item, they really wanted to give us the whole order so that they could get the best price. What happens when a negotiator is given the scent of such an order? If we’re not careful, the first thing that pops into our mind is the number $33,000,000. Even with a volume discount thrown in, even for a large multinational, this counts as real money. As new business, it would be a triumph for any negotiator. If we’re not careful, the blank slate has just been wiped away by this positive expectation. And that’s exactly what the other team was trying to do in this case—build our expectations.

Anyone with much experience in business can recall when they didn’t even bother calling on a potential client or supplier or customer because they assumed this deal would never work out, only to learn later that it might well have worked out.

Japanese. Before they go into any negotiation they do in-depth research, sending out teams to study and gather facts about the companies and the markets involved. But we Americans often skip this vital step.

In seminars, meetings, and negotiations, I can quickly tell which ones are the most successful people around the table. They are effectively silencing their own thoughts and learning as much as they can about their adversary’s world. They are the ones listening closely and taking notes. They are blank slating and gathering the pieces of the puzzle. (It’s important to note that they are not solving the puzzle. That comes later, with analysis, with burning the midnight oil.) They know that what is really said and what we actually hear during a negotiation is far more important than what we allow ourselves to think while others talk. In order to blank slate effectively, the little voice in our own heads must be silent.

As we take notes, we are also allowing the adversary to be more okay, by making her feel more important because we are taking notes on what she has to say.

The next meeting you go to, pull out your legal pad instead of your business card. Next time the phone rings, pick up your pen, really listen, and take notes—even if it’s your mother on the line. (That might be the ultimate challenge—trying to blank slate with a close member of your family!)

Pain. This is what brings every adversary in every negotiation to the table.

When you begin any new negotiation or find yourself losing control of an ongoing negotiation, you return to—what? Your mission and purpose. And where is your mission and purpose set? In your adversary’s world. And what is embedded deep within your adversary’s world? Their pain. When in doubt, return to the pain.

“Gee, that’s a bad break. How long will your car be in the shop?” “That’s terrible. How long will your company pay for the temporary apartment?” “This is great technology. You must really have invested a lot in it.” “Sure we have a lot of competitors, so you’re in good shape in that regard. Now when do you need to get your line back up and running?”

The clearer your adversary’s vision of his pain, the easier the decision-making process.

You help create the vision, but you don’t create the pain itself at all. The pain is just there. The doctor doesn’t create your pain; she helps you see your case clearly. The retail salesperson isn’t starting from scratch. My son Jim and I didn’t wander onto the parking lot of the Porsche dealership by accident. I wanted that Cabriolet badly. No salesman in the world was going to be able to convince me that I had an aching need I didn’t really have. Likewise, no one wanders into an electronics store intent on buying a new refrigerator. The salesperson always has something to work with. And it wasn’t as if Churchill had nothing to work with in his negotiation with his constituents. Western Europe and the United States did need to gear up for the war with Hitler. The British certainly knew the dangers posed by Hitler. They just needed their vision and the solution painted with passion.

Rather than set out on the sometimes long, hard road of painting vision and pain, many negotiators make the fatal mistake of thinking they can convince someone to make the rational decision to do something, to buy something, to see something the same way they see it. They offer up reasons, facts, figures, and charm that they are sure would make any rational person see things the way they see them. In fact, most negotiators think of the gift of gab as one of their greatest assets. But what’s the problem with trying to convince someone to see the same thing you see? You know the answer to this question, but let’s go ahead and spell it out. To begin with, you’re asking your adversary to come into your world and to see your world. And where do we want to spend our time in a negotiation? In the adversary’s world. Second, if we’re busy giving reasons to our adversary, we’re too busy talking; we’re totally in our world and impeding our ability to blank slate. Finally, and most important of all, we’re forgetting that decisions are made not with our head but with our heart and guts, first of all. Remember, negotiations are 100 percent emotional until a decision is made.

You cannot tell anyone anything. Think about this and be sure you agree with me. You can only help people see for themselves. To test this thesis, a clever client once devised a clever experiment. He was making a presentation to a financial analyst, and he did it twice, in effect—once in the standard didactic way, and then a second time in which he asked questions of the analyst. In the first presentation, the analyst sat quietly and took a few notes, but the second time around he filled page after page with notes as he engaged with the interrogatives from my client. Since that day, that particular client has understood completely the power of asking questions as a way of painting the vision, the pain, so the adversary in a negotiation sees it for his own.

For some strange reason, I got to thinking about Beat the Clock years later, and I realized that we, the audience, focused on the clock, while we should have been watching the contestants’ activity and behavior. Worse, the contestants were always looking up to see how much time they had remaining. But this shouldn’t have mattered. They were working as fast as they could, weren’t they? If they beat the clock, they beat it; if they didn’t, they didn’t. Watching the clock only slowed them down and made it more likely that they would not beat the clock. Bottom line: usually it wasn’t the clock that beat them. They beat themselves with what I call invalid behavior.

Well, we’ve already invested so much in this deal, we have to get something out of it. That’s the classic logic that yields bad deals.

The great negotiator in any field must not lift a finger without a clear picture of the negotiation coming up—a clear picture of the adversary’s pain and a firm knowledge that the adversary has the budgets in time-and-energy, money, and emotion to pay—negotiate—to have this pain taken away.

We do want to spend energy in preparation and research, but the shocking reality is that many people won’t or don’t prepare for negotiations. They won’t spend the time or the energy required. This isn’t conserving energy, this is laziness, which inevitably wastes energy at a later stage of the negotiation.

How many times have you read about a big labor conflict that was finally resolved at four in the morning? That’s because when we get tired, we become impatient and more vulnerable.

Less obviously, perhaps, a consumer may not be able to see value if the price of a given product is too low in his frame of reference. On the other hand, he will search for value if the price is deemed high.

You must know your own budget for money and, as Craig learned, you must know your adversary’s budget as well.

I know all about thrill and agony. For sports fans, these extreme emotions are fine. They’re mandatory for the fun. For negotiators, they’re dangerous. I’ll stick by my original calculus: time is 1x, energy is 2x, money 3x, and emotion 4x. Emotions have an extremely high value in any negotiation.