Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

by Chris Voss

“Well, Chris,” he said, still smiling. “That was one of the worst calls I ever heard.” I stared at him, gape-jawed. “Jim, did you hear Daryl congratulate me?” I asked. “I talked him down, man. I killed it.” Jim smiled—I hated that smile right then—and nodded. “That’s one of the signs, because they should be congratulating themselves when they get off the line,” he said. “They don’t need to be congratulating you. That tells me you did too much. If they think you did it—if you were the guy who killed it—how is he going to help himself? I don’t want to be harsh, but you were horrible.” As I listened to what Jim said, I felt that acid stomach rush you get when you are forced to accept that the guy dumping on you is completely right. Daryl’s response had been a kind of “yes,” but it had been anything but a true commitment “yes.” He’d made no promise to action. His “yes” had been designed to make me feel good enough to leave him alone. Daryl may not have known it, but his “yes” was as counterfeit as they came. You see, that whole call had been about me and my ego and not the caller. But the only way to get these callers to take action was to have them own the conversation, to believe that they were coming to these conclusions, to these necessary next steps, and that the voice at the other end was simply a medium for those realizations. Using all your skills to create rapport, agreement, and connection with a counterpart is useful, but ultimately that connection is useless unless...